# A Son at the Front/Chapter 12

XII
Not having it in his power to call up his cousin on the telephone, Campton went the next morning to the Nouveau Luxe.
It was the first time that he had entered the famous hotel since the beginning of the war; and at sight of the long hall his heart sank as it used to whenever some untoward necessity forced him to run its deadly blockade.
But the hall was empty when he entered, empty not only of the brilliant beings who filled his soul with such dismay, but also of the porters, footmen and lift-boys who, even in its unfrequented hours, lent it the lustre of their liveries.
A tired concierge sat at the desk, and near the door a boy scout, coiling his bare legs about a high stool, raised his head languidly from his book. But for these two, the world of the Nouveau Luxe had disappeared.
As the lift was not running there was nothing to disturb their meditations; and when Campton had learned that Mr. Mayhew would receive him he started alone up the deserted stairs.
Only a few dusty trunks remained in the corridors where luggage used to be piled as high as in the passages of the great liners on sailing-day; and instead of ​the murmur of ladies'-maids' skirts, and explosions of laughter behind glazed service-doors, the swish of a charwoman's mop alone broke the silence.
"After all," Campton thought, "if war didn't kill people how much pleasanter it might make the world!"
This was evidently not the opinion of Mr. Harvey Mayhew, whom he found agitatedly pacing a large room hung in shrimp-pink brocade, which opened on a vista of turquoise tiling and porcelain tub.
Mr. Mayhew's round countenance, composed of the same simple curves as his nephew's, had undergone a remarkable change. He was still round, but he was ravaged. His fringe of hair had grown greyer, and there were crow's-feet about his blue eyes, and wrathful corrugations in his benignant forehead.
He seized Campton's hands and glared at him through indignant eye-glasses.
"My dear fellow, I looked you up as soon as I arrived. I need you—we all need you—we need your powerful influence and your world-wide celebrity. Campton, the day for words has gone by. We must act!"
Campton let himself down into an armchair. No verb in the language terrified him as much as that which his cousin had flung at him. He gazed at the ex-Delegate with dismay. "I didn't know you were here. Where have you come from?" he asked.
Mr. Mayhew, resting a manicured hand on the edge of a gilt table, looked down awfully on him.
​"I come," he said, "from a German prison."
"Good Lord—you?" Campton gasped.
He continued to gaze at his cousin with terror, but of a new kind. Here at last was someone who had actually been in the jaws of the monster, who had seen, heard, suffered—a witness who could speak of that which he knew! No wonder Mr. Mayhew took himself seriously—at last he had something to be serious about! Campton stared at him as if he had risen from the dead.
Mr. Mayhew cleared his throat and went on: "You may remember our meeting at the Crillon—on the 31st of last July it was—and my asking you the best way of getting to the Hague, in view of impending events. At that time" (his voice took a note of irony) "I was a Delegate to the Peace Congress at the Hague, and conceived it to be my duty to carry out my mandate at whatever personal risk. You advised me—as you may also remember—in order to be out of the way of trouble, to travel by Luxembourg," (Campton stirred uneasily). "I followed your advice; and, not being able to go by train, I managed, with considerable difficulty, to get permission to travel by motor. I reached Luxembourg as the German army entered it—the next day I was in a German prison."
The next day! Then this pink-and-white man who stood there with his rimless eye-glasses and neatly trimmed hair, and his shining nails reflected in the plate glass of the table-top, this perfectly typical, usual ​sort of harmless rich American, had been for four months in the depths of the abyss that men were beginning to sound with fearful hearts!
"It is a simple miracle," said Mr. Mayhew, "that I was not shot as a spy."
Campton's voice choked in his throat. "Where were you imprisoned?"
"The first night, in the Police commissariat, with common thieves and vagabonds—with—" Mr. Mayhew lowered his voice and his eyes: "With prostitutes, Campton. . ."
He waited for this to take effect, and continued: "The next day, in consequence of the energetic intervention of our consul—who behaved extremely well, as I have taken care to let them know in Washington—I was sent back to my hotel on parole, and kept there, kept there, Campton—I, the official representative of a friendly country—under strict police surveillance, like . . . like an unfortunate woman . . . for eight days: a week and one day over!"
Mr. Mayhew sank into a chair and passed a scented handkerchief across his forehead. "When I was finally released I was without money, without luggage, without my motor or my wretched chauffeur—a Frenchman, who had been instantly carried off to Germany. In this state of destitution, and without an apology, I was shipped to Rotterdam and put on a steamer sailing for America." He wiped his forehead again, ​and the corners of his agitated lips. "Peace, Campton—Peace? When I think that I believed in a thing called Peace! That I left Utica—always a difficult undertaking for me—because I deemed it my duty, in the interests of Peace," (the word became a hiss) "to travel to the other side of the world, and use the weight of my influence and my experience in such a cause!"
He clenched his fist and shook it in the face of an invisible foe.
"My influence, if I have any; my experience—ha, I have had experience now, Campton! And, my God, sir, they shall both be used till my last breath to show up these people, to proclaim to the world what they really are, to rouse public opinion in America against a nation of savages who ought to be hunted off the face of the globe like vermin—like the vermin in their own prison cells! Campton—if I may say so without profanity—I come to bring not Peace but a Sword!"
It was some time before the flood of Mr. Mayhew's wrath subsided, or before there floated up from its agitated depths some fragments of his subsequent history and present intentions. Eventually, however, Campton gathered that after a short sojourn in America, where he found opinion too lukewarm for him, he had come back to Europe to collect the experiences of other victims of German savagery. Mr. Mayhew, in short, meant to devote himself to Atrocities; and he had sought out Campton to ask his help, and especially ​to be put in contact with persons engaged in refugee-work, and likely to have come across flagrant offences against the law of nations.
It was easy to comply with the latter request. Campton scribbled a message to Adele Anthony at her refugee Depot; and he undertook also to find out from what officials Mr. Mayhew might obtain leave to visit the front.
"I know it's difficult———" he began; but Mr. Mayhew laughed. "I am here to surmount difficulties—after what I've been through!"
It was not until then that Mr. Mayhew found time to answer an enquiry about his nephew.
"Benny Upsher? Ha—I'm proud of Benny! He's a hero, that nephew of mine—he was always my favourite."
He went on to say that the youth, having failed to enlist in the French army, had managed to get back to England, and there, passing himself off as a Canadian ("Born at Murray Bay, sir—wasn't it lucky?") had joined an English regiment, and, after three months' training, was now on his way to the front. His parents had made a great outcry—moved heaven and earth for news of him—but the boy had covered up his tracks so cleverly that they had had no word till he was starting for Boulogne with his draft. Rather high-handed—and poor Madeline had nearly gone out of her mind; but Mr. Mayhew confessed he had no patience with ​such feminine weakness. "Benny's a man, and must act as a man. That boy, Campton, saw things as they were from the first."
Campton took leave, dazed and crushed by the conversation. It was all one to him if Harvey Mayhew chose to call on America to avenge his wrongs; Campton himself was beginning to wish that his country would wake up to what was going on in the world; but that he, Campton, should be drawn into the affair, should have to write letters, accompany the ex-Delegate to Embassies and Red Crosses, languish with him in ministerial antechambers, and be deafened with appeals to his own celebrity and efficiency; that he should have ascribed to himself that mysterious gift of "knowing the ropes" in which his whole blundering career had proved him to be cruelly lacking: this was so dreadful to him as to obscure every other question.
"Thank the Lord," he muttered, "I haven't got the telephone anyhow!"
He glanced cautiously down the wide stairs of the hotel to assure himself of a safe retreat; but in the hall an appealing voice detained him.
"Dear Master! Dear great Master! I've been lying in wait for you!"
A Red Cross nurse advanced: not the majestic figure of the Crimean legend, but the new version evolved in the rue de la Paix: short skirts, long ankles, pearls and curls. The face under the coif was young, wistful, ​haggard with the perpetual hurry of the aimless. Where had he seen those tragic eyes, so full of questions and so invariably uninterested in the answers?
"I'm Madge Talkett—I saw you at—I saw you the day war was declared," the young lady corrected herself. Campton remembered their meeting at Mrs. Brant's, and was grateful for her evident embarrassment. So few of the new generation seemed aware that there were any privacies left to respect! He looked at Mrs. Talkett more kindly.
"You must come," she continued, laying her hand on his arm (her imperatives were always in italics). "Just a step from here—to my hospital. There's someone asking for you."
"For me? Someone wounded?" What if it were Benny Upsher? A cold fear broke over Campton.
"Someone dying," Mrs. Talkett said. "Oh, nobody you know—a poor young French soldier. He was brought here two days ago . . . and he keeps on repeating your name. . ."
"My name? Why my name?"
"We don't know. We don't think he knows you . . . but he's shot to pieces and half delirious. He's a painter, and he's seen pictures of yours, and keeps talking about them, and saying he wants you to look at his. . . You will come? It's just next door, you know."
He did not know—having carefully avoided all knowledge of hospitals in his dread of being drawn into ​war-work, and his horror of coming as a mere spectator to gaze on agony he could neither comfort nor relieve. Hospitals were for surgeons and women; if he had been rich he would have given big sums to aid them; being unable to do even that, he preferred to keep aloof.
He followed Mrs. Talkett out of the hotel and around the corner. The door of another hotel, with a big Red Cross above it, admitted them to a marble vestibule full of the cold smell of disinfectants. An orderly sat reading a newspaper behind the desk, and nurses whisked backward and forward with trays and pails. A lady with a bunch of flowers came down the stairs drying her eyes.
Campton's whole being recoiled from what awaited him. Since the poor youth was delirious, what was the use of seeing him? But women took a morbid pleasure in making one do things that were useless!
On an upper floor they paused at a door where there was a moment's parleying.
"Come," Mrs. Talkett said; "he's a little better."
The room contained two beds. In one lay a haggard elderly man with closed eyes and lips drawn back from his clenched teeth. His legs stirred restlessly, and one of his arms was in a lifted sling attached to a horrible kind of gallows above the bed. It reminded Campton of Juan de Borgoña's pictures of the Inquisition, in the Prado.
​"Oh, he's all right; he'll get well. It's the other. . ."
The other lay quietly in his bed. No gallows overhung him, no visible bandaging showed his wound. There was a flush on his young cheeks and his eyes looked out, large and steady, from their hollow brows. But he was the one who would not get well.
Mrs. Talkett bent over him: her voice was sweet when it was lowered.
"I've kept my promise. Here he is."
The eyes turned in the lad's immovable head, and he and Campton looked at each other. The painter had never seen the face before him: a sharp irregular face, prematurely hollowed by pain, with thick chestnut hair tumbled above the forehead.
"It's you, Master!" the boy said.
Campton sat down beside him. "How did you know? Have you seen me before?"
"Once—at one of your exhibitions." He paused and drew a hard breath. "But the first thing was the portrait at the Luxembourg . . . your son. . ."
"Ah, you look like him!" Campton broke out.
The eyes of the young soldier lit up. "Do I? . . . Someone told me he was your son. I went home from seeing that and began to paint. After the war, would you let me come and work with you? My things . . . wait. . . I'll show you my things first." He tried to raise himself. Mrs. Talkett slipped her arm under his shoulders, and resting against her he lifted his hand and pointed to the bare wall facing him.
​"There—there; you see? Look for yourself. The brushwork . . . not too bad, eh? I was . . . getting it. . . There, that head of my grandfather, eh? And my lame sister. . . Oh, I'm young . . . he smiled . . . "never had any models. . . But after the war you'll see. . ."
Mrs. Talkett let him down again, and feverishly, vehemently, he began to describe, one by one, and over and over again, the pictures he saw on the naked wall in front of him.
A nurse had slipped in, and Mrs. Talkett signed to Campton to follow her out. The boy seemed aware that the painter was going, and interrupted his enumeration to say: "As soon as the war's over you'll let me come?"
"Of course I will," Campton promised.
In the passage he asked: "Can nothing save him? Has everything possible been done?"
"Everything. We're all so fond of him—the biggest surgeons have seen him. It seems he has great talent—but he never could afford models, so he has painted his family over and over again." Mrs. Talkett looked at Campton with a good deal of feeling in her changing eyes. "You see, it did help, your coming. I know you thought it tiresome of me to insist." She led him downstairs and into the office, where a lame officer with the Croix de Guerre sat at the desk. The officer wrote out the young soldier's name—René Davril—and his family's address.
​"They're quite destitute, Monsieur. An old infirm grandfather, a lame sister who taught music, a widowed mother and several younger children. . ."
"I'll come back, I'll come back," Campton again promised as he parted from Mrs. Talkett.
He had not thought it possible that he would ever feel so kindly toward her as at that moment. And then, a second later, she nearly spoiled it by saying: "Dear Master—you see the penalty of greatness!"
The name of René Davril was with Campton all day. The boy had believed in him—his eyes had been opened by the sight of George's portrait! And now, in a day or two more, he would be filling a three-by-six ditch in a crowded graveyard. At twenty—and with eyes like George's.
What could Campton do? No one was less visited by happy inspirations; the "little acts of kindness" recommended to his pious infancy had always seemed to him far harder to think of than to perform. But now some instinct carried him straight to the corner of his studio where he remembered having shoved out of sight a half-finished study for George's portrait. He found it, examined it critically, scribbled his signature in one corner, and set out with it for the hospital. On the way he had to stop at the Ministry of War on Mayhew's tiresome business, and was delayed there till too late to proceed with his errand before luncheon. But ​in the afternoon he passed in again through the revolving plate glass, and sent up his name. Mrs. Talkett was not there, but a nurse came down, to whom, with embarrassment, he explained himself.
"Poor little Davril? Yes—he's still alive. Will you come up? His family are with him."
Campton shook his head and held out the parcel. "It's a picture he wanted———"
The nurse promised it should be given. She looked at Campton with a vague benevolence, having evidently never heard his name; and the painter turned away with a cowardly sense that he ought to have taken the picture up himself. But to see the death-change on a face so like his son's, and its look reflected in other anguished faces, was more than he could endure. He turned away.
The next morning Mrs. Talkett wrote that René Davril was better, that the fever had dropped, and that he was lying quietly looking at the sketch. "The only thing that troubles him is that he realizes now that you have not seen his pictures. But he is very happy, and blesses you for your goodness."
His goodness! Campton, staring at the letter, could only curse himself for his stupidity. He saw now that the one thing which might have comforted the poor lad would have been to have his own pictures seen and judged; and that one thing, he, Campton, so many years vainly athirst for the approbation of the men he ​revered—that one thing he had never thought of doing! The only way of atoning for his negligence was instantly to go out to the suburb where the Davril family lived. Campton, without a scruple, abandoned Mr. Mayhew, with whom he had an appointment at the Embassy and another at the War Office, and devoted the rest of the day to the expedition. It was after six when he reached the hospital again; and when Mrs. Talkett came down he went up to her impetuously.
"Well—I've seen them; I've seen his pictures, and he's right. They're astonishing! Awkward, still, and hesitating; but with such a sense of air and mass. He'll do things—May I go up and tell him?"
He broke off and looked at her.
"He died an hour ago. If only you'd seen them yesterday!" she said.