XXVIII
Preparedness!" cried Boylston in an exultant crow.
His round brown face with its curly crest and peering half-blind eyes beamed at Campton in the old way across the desk of the Palais Royal office; and from the corner where she had sunk down on one of the broken-springed divans, Adele Anthony echoed: "Preparedness!"
It was the first time that Campton had heard the word; but the sense of it had been in the air ever since he and George had got back to Paris. He remembered, on the very day of their arrival, noticing something different in both Boylston and Miss Anthony; and the change had shown itself in the same way: both seemed more vivid yet more remote. It had struck Campton in the moment of first meeting them, in the Paris hospital near the Bois de Boulogne—Fortin-Lescluze's old Nursing-Home transformed into a House of Re-education—to which George had been taken. In the little cell crowded with flowers—almost too many flowers, his father thought, for the patient's aching head and tired eyes—Campton, watching the entrance of the two visitors, the first to be admitted after Julia and Mr. Brant, had instantly remarked the air they had of sharing something so secret and important that their joy at seeing George seemed only the overflow of another deeper joy.
Their look had just such a vividness as George's own; as their glances crossed, Campton saw the same light in the eyes of all three. And now, a few weeks later, the clue to it came to him in Boylston's new word. Preparedness! America, it appeared, had caught it up from east to west, in that sudden incalculable way she had of flinging herself on a new idea; from a little group of discerning spirits the contagion had spread like a prairie fire, sweeping away all the other catchwords of the hour, devouring them in one great blaze of wrath and enthusiasm. America meant to be prepared! First had come the creation of the training camp at Plattsburg, for which, after long delays and much difficulty, permission had been wrung from a reluctant government; then, as candidates flocked to it, as the whole young manhood of the Eastern States rose to the call, other camps, rapidly planned, were springing up at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, at Fort Sheridan in Illinois, at The Presidio in California; for the idea was spreading through the West, and the torch kindled beside the Atlantic seaboard already flashed its light on the Pacific.
For hours at a time Campton heard Boylston talking about these training camps with the young Americans who helped him in his work, or dropped in to seek his counsel. More than ever, now, he was an authority and an oracle to these stray youths who were expending their enthusiasm for France in the humblest of philanthropic drudgery: students of the Beaux Arts or the University, or young men of leisure discouraged by the indifference of their country and the dilatoriness of their government, and fired by the desire to take part in a struggle in which they had instantly felt their own country to be involved in spite of geographical distance.
None of these young men had heard Benny Upsher's imperious call to be "in it" from the first, no matter how or at what cost. They were of the kind to wait for a lead—and now Boylston was giving it to them with his passionate variations on the great theme of Preparedness. George, meanwhile, lay there in his bed and smiled; and now and then Boylston brought one or two of the more privileged candidates to see him. One day Campton found young Louis Dastrey there, worn and haggard after a bad wound, and preparing to leave for America as instructor in one of the new camps. That seemed to bring the movement closer than ever, to bring it into their very lives. The thought flashed through Campton: "When George is up, we'll get him sent out too"; and once again a delicious sense of security crept through him.
George, as yet, was only sitting up for a few hours a day; the wound in the lung was slow in healing, and his fractured arm in recovering its flexibility. But in another fortnight he was to leave the hospital and complete his convalescence at his mother's.
The thought was bitter to Campton; he had had all kinds of wild plans—of taking George to the Crillon, or hiring an apartment for him, or even camping with him at the studio. But George had smiled all this away. He meant to return to the Avenue Marigny, where he always stayed when he came to Paris, and where it was natural that his mother should want him now. Adele Anthony pointed out to Campton how natural it was, one day as he and she left the Palais Royal together. They were going to lunch at a near-by restaurant, as they often did on leaving the office, and Campton had begun to speak of George's future arrangements. He would be well enough to leave the hospital in another week, and then no doubt a staff-job could be obtained for him in Paris———" with Brant's pull, you know," Campton concluded, hardly aware that he had uttered the detested phrase without even a tinge of irony. But Adele was aware, as he saw by the faint pucker of her thin lips.
He shrugged her smile away indifferently. "Oh, well—hang it, yes! Everything's changed now, isn't it? After what the boy's been through I consider that we're more than justified in using Brant's pull in his favour—or anybody else's."
Miss Anthony nodded and unfolded her napkin.
"Well, then," Campton continued his argument, "as he's likely to be in Paris now till the war is over—which means some time next year, they all say—why shouldn't I take a jolly apartment somewhere for the two of us? Those pictures I did last spring brought me in a lot of money, and there's no reason———" His face lit up. "Servants, you say? Why, my poor Mariette may be back from Lille any time now. They tell me there's sure to be a big push in the spring. They're saving up for that all along the line. Ask Dastrey . . . ask. . ."
"You'd better let George go to his mother," said Miss Anthony concisely.
"Why?"
"Because it's natural—it's human. You're not always, you know," she added with another pucker.
"Not human?"
"I don't mean that you're inhuman. But you see things differently."
"I don't want to see anything but one; and that's my own son. How shall I ever see George if he's at the Avenue Marigny?"
"He'll come to you."
"Yes—when he's not at Mrs. Talkett's!"
Miss Anthony frowned. The subject had been touched upon between them soon after Campton's return, but Miss Anthony had little light to throw on it: George had been as mute with her as with every one else, and she knew Mrs. Talkett but slightly, and seldom saw her. Yet Campton perceived that she could not hear the young woman named without an involuntary contraction of her brows.
"I wish I liked her!" she murmured.
"Mrs. Talkett?"
"Yes—I should think better of myself if I did. And it might be useful. But I can't—I can't!"
Campton said within himself: "Oh, women———!" For his own resentment had died out long ago. He could think of the affair now as one of hundreds such as happen to young men; he was even conscious of regarding it, in some unlit secret fold of himself, as a probable guarantee of George's wanting to remain in Paris, another subterranean way of keeping him, should such be needed. Perhaps that was what Miss Anthony meant by saying that her liking Mrs. Talkett might be "useful."
"Why shouldn't he be with me?" the father persisted. "He and I were going off together when the war begun. I was defrauded of that—why shouldn't I have him now?"
Miss Anthony smiled. "Well, for one thing, because of that very 'pull' you were speaking of."
"Oh, the Brants, the Brants!" Campton glanced impatiently at the bill-of-fare, grumbled: "Déjeuner du jour, I suppose?" and went on: "Yes; I might have known it—he belongs to them. From the minute we got back, and I saw them at the station, with their motor waiting, and everything arranged as only money can arrange it, I knew I'd lost my boy again." He stared moodily before him. "And yet if the war hadn't come I should have got him back—I almost had."
His companion still smiled, a little wistfully. She leaned over and laid her hand on his, under cover of the bill-of-fare. "You did get him back, John, forever and always, the day he exchanged into the infantry. Isn't that enough?"
Campton answered her smile. "You gallant old chap, you!" he said; and they began to lunch.
George was able to be up now, able to drive out, and to see more people; and Campton was not surprised, on approaching his door a day or two later, to hear several voices in animated argument.
The voices (and this did surprise him) were all men's. In one he recognized Boy Is ton's deep round notes; but the answering voice, flat, toneless and yet eager, puzzled him with a sense of something familiar but forgotten. He opened the door, and saw, at the tea-tray between George and Boylston, the smoothly-brushed figure of Roger Talkett.
Campton had not seen Mrs. Talkett's husband for months, and in the interval so much had happened that the young man, always somewhat faintly-drawn, had become as dim as a daguerreotype held at the wrong angle.
The painter hung back, slightly embarrassed; but Mr. Talkett did not seem in the least disturbed by his appearance, or by the fact of himself being where he was. It was evident that, on whatever terms George might be with his wife, Mr. Talkett was determined to shed on him the same impartial beam as on all her other visitors.
His eye-glasses glinted blandly up at Campton. "Now I daresay I am subversive," he began, going on with what he had been saying, but in a tone intended to include the newcomer. "I don't say I'm not. We are a subversive lot at home, all of us—you must have noticed that, haven't you, Mr. Campton?"
Boylston emitted a faint growl. "What's that got to do with it?" he asked.
Mr. Talkett's glasses slanted in his direction. "Why—everything! Resistance to the herd-instinct (to borrow one of my wife's expressions) is really innate in me. And the idea of giving in now, of sacrificing my convictions, just because of all this deafening noise about America's danger and America's duties—well, no," said Mr. Talkett, straightening his glasses, "Philistinism won't go down with me, in whatever form it tries to disguise itself." Instinctively, he stretched a neat hand toward the tea-cups, as if he had been rearranging the furniture at one of his wife's parties.
"But—but—but———" Boylston stuttered, red with rage.
George burst into a laugh. He seemed to take a boyish amusement in the dispute. "Tea, father?" he suggested, reaching across the tray for a cigarette.
Talkett jerked himself to his feet. "Take my chair, now do, Mr. Campton. You'll be more comfortable. Here, let me shake up this cushion for you———" ("Cushion!" Boylston interjected scornfully.) "A light, George? Now don't move!—I don't say, of course, old chap," Talkett continued, as he held the match deferentially to George's cigarette, "that this sort of talk would be safe—or advisable—just now in public; subversive talk never is. But when two or three of the Elect are gathered together—well, your father sees my point, I know. The Hero," he nodded at George, "has his job, and the Artist," with a slant at Campton, "his. In Germany, for instance, as we're beginning to find out, the creative minds, the Intelligentsia (to use another of my wife's expressions), have been carefully protected from the beginning, given jobs, vitally important jobs of course, but where their lives were not exposed. The country needs them too much in other ways; they would probably be wretched fighters, and they're of colossal service in their own line. Whereas in France and England———" he suddenly seemed to see his chance——— "Well, look here, Mr. Campton, I appeal to you, I appeal to the great creative Artist: in any country but France and England, would a fellow of George's brains have been allowed, even at this stage of the war, to chuck an important staff job, requiring intellect, tact and savoir faire, and try to get himself killed like any unbaked boy—like your poor cousin Benny Upsher, for instance? Would he?"
"Yes—in America!" shouted Boylston; and Mr. Talkett's tallowy cheeks turned pink.
"George knows how I feel about these things," he stammered.
George still laughed in his remote impartial way, and Boylston asked with a grin: "Why don't you get yourself naturalized—a neutral?"
Mr. Talkett's pinkness deepened. "I have lived too much among Artists———" he began; and George interrupted gaily: "There's a lot to be said on Talkett's side too. Going, Roger? Well, I shall be able to look in on you now in a few days. Remember me to Madge. Good-bye."
Boylston rose also, and Campton remained alone with his son.
"Remember me to Madge!" That was the way in Tvhich the modern young man spoke of his beloved to his beloved's proprietor. There had not been a shadow of constraint in George's tone; and now, glancing at the door which had closed on Mr. Talkett, he merely said, as if apostrophizing the latter's neat back: "Poor devil! He's torn to pieces with it."
"With what?" asked Campton, startled.
"Why, with Boylston's Preparedness. Wanting to do the proper thing—and never before having had to decide between anything more vital than straight or turned-down collars. It's playing the very deuce with him."
His eyes grew thoughtful. Was he going to pronounce Mrs. Talkett's name—at last? But no; he wandered back to her husband. "Poor little ass! Of course he'll decide against." He shrugged his shoulders. "And Boylston's just as badly torn in the other direction."
"Boylston?"
"Yes. Knowing that he wouldn't be taken himself, on account of his bad heart and his blind eyes, and wondering if, in spite of his disabilities, he's got the right to preach to all these young chaps here who hang on his words like the gospel. One of them taunted him with it the other day."
"The cur!"
"Yes. And ever since, of course, Boylston's been twice as fierce, and overworking himself to calm his frenzy. The men who can't go are all like that, when they know it's their proper work. It isn't everybody's billet out there—I've learnt that since I've had a look at it—but it would be Boylston's if he had the health, and he knows it, and that's what drives him wild." George looked at his father with a smile. "You don't know how I thank my stars that there weren't any `problems' for me, but just a plain job that picked me up by the collar, and dropped me down where I belonged." He reached for another cigarette. "Old Adele's coming presently. Do you suppose we could rake up some fresh tea?" he asked.