BOOK IV
XXXII
Heavily the weeks went by.
The world continued to roar on through smoke and flame, and contrasted with that headlong race was the slow dragging lapse of hours and days to those who had to wait on events inactively.
When Campton met Paul Dastrey for the first time after the death of the latter's nephew, the two men exchanged a long hand-clasp and then sat silent. As Campton had felt from the first, there was nothing left for them to say to each other. If young men like Louis Dastrey must continue to be sacrificed by hundreds of thousands to save their country, for whom was the country being saved? Was it for the wasp-waisted youths in sham uniforms who haunted the reawakening hotels and restaurants, in the frequent intervals between their ambulance trips to safe distances from the front? Or for the elderly men like Dastrey and Campton, who could only sit facing each other with the spectre of the lost between them? Young Dastrey, young Fortin-Lescluze, Rene Davril, Benny Upsher—and how many hundreds more each day! And not even a child left by most of them, to carry on the faith they had died for. . .
"If we're giving all we care for so that those little worms can reopen their dance-halls on the ruins, what in God's name is left?" Campton questioned.
Dastrey sat looking at the ground, his grey head bent between his hands. "France," he said.
"What's France, with no men left?"
"Well—I suppose, an Idea."
"Yes. I suppose so." Campton stood up heavily.
An Idea: they must cling to that. If Dastrey, from the depths of his destitution, could still feel it and live by it, why did it not help Campton more? An Idea: that was what France, ever since she had existed, had always been in the story of civilization; a luminous point about which striving visions and purposes could rally. And in that sense she had been as much Campton's spiritual home as Dastrey's; to thinkers, artists, to all creators, she had always been a second country. If France went, western civilization went with her; and then all they had believed in and been guided by would perish. That was what George had felt; it was what had driven him from the Argonne to the Aisne. Campton felt it too; but dully, through a fog. His son was safe; yes—but too many other men's sons were dying. There was no spot where his thoughts could rest: there were moments when the sight of George, intact and immaculate—his arm at last out of its sling—rose before his father like a reproach.
The feeling was senseless; but there it was. Whenever the young man entered the room Campton saw him attended by the invisible host of his comrades, the fevered, the maimed and the dying. The Germans had attacked at Verdun: horrible daily details of the struggle were pouring in. No one at the rear had really known, except in swift fitful flashes, about the individual suffering of the first months of the war; now such information was systematized and distributed everywhere, daily, with a cold impartial hand. And every night, when one laid one's old bones on one's bed, there were those others, the young in their thousands, lying down, perhaps never to rise again, in the mud and blood of the trenches.
Even Boylston's Preparedness was beginning to get on Campton's nerves. He tried to picture to himself how he should exult when his country at last fell into line; but he could realize only what his humiliation would be if she did not. It was almost a relief, at this time, to have his mind diverted to the dissensions among "The Friends of French Art," where, at a stormy meeting, Harvey Mayhew, as a member of the Finance Committee, had asked for an accounting of the money taken in at Mrs. Talkett's concert. This money, Mr. Mayhew stated, had passed through a number of hands. It should have been taken over by Mr. Boylston, as treasurer, at the close of the performance; but he had failed to claim it—had, in fact, been unfindable when the organizers of the concert brought their takings to Mrs. Talkett—and the money, knocking about from hand to hand, had finally been carried by Mrs. Talkett herself to Mr. Campton. The latter, when asked to entrust it to Mr. Mayhew, had refused on the ground that he had already deposited it in the bank; but a number of days later it was known to be still in his possession. All this time Mr. Boylston, treasurer, and chairman of the Financial Committee, appeared to think it quite in order that the funds should have been (as he assumed) deposited in the bank by a member who was not on that particular committee, and who, in reality, had forgotten that they were in his possession.
Mr. Mayhew delivered himself of this indictment amid an embarrassed silence. To Campton it had seemed as if a burst of protest must instantly clear the air. But after he himself had apologized for his negligence in not depositing the money, and Boylston had disengaged his responsibility in a few quiet words, there followed another blank interval. Then Mr. Mayhew suddenly suggested a complete reorganization of the work. He had something to criticize in every department. He, who so seldom showed himself at the office, now presented a list of omissions and commissions against which one after another of the active members rose to enter a mild denial. It was clear that some one belonging to the organization, and who was playing into his hands, had provided him with a series of cleverly falsified charges against the whole group of workers.
Presently Campton could stand it no longer, and, jumping up, suddenly articulate, he flung into his cousin's face a handful of home-truths under which he expected that glossy countenance to lose its lustre. But Mr. Mayhew bore the assault with urbanity. It did not behove him, he said, to take up the reproaches addressed to him by the most distinguished member of their committee—the most distinguished, he might surely say without offence to any of the others (a murmur of assent); it did not behove him, because one of the few occasions on which a great artist may be said to be at a disadvantage is when he is trying to discuss business matters with a man of business. He, Mr. Mayhew, was only that, nothing more; but he was that, and he had been trained to answer random abuse by hard facts. In no way did he intend to reflect on the devoted labours of certain ladies of the committee, nor on their sympathetic treasurer's gallant efforts to acquire, amid all his other pressing interests, the rudiments of business habits; but Miss Anthony had all along been dividing her time between two widely different charities, and Mr. Boylston, like his distinguished champion, was first of all an artist, with the habits of the studio rather than of the office. In the circumstances———
Campton jumped to his feet again. If he stayed a moment longer he felt he should knock Mayhew down. He jammed his hat on, shouted out "I resign," and limped out of the room.
It was the way in which his encounters with practical difficulties always ended. The consciousness of his inferiority in argument, the visionary's bewilderment when incomprehensible facts are thrust on him by fluent people, the helpless sense of not knowing what to answer, and of seeing his dream-world smashed in the rough-and-tumble of shabby motives—it all gave him the feeling that he was drowning, and must fight his way to the surface before they had him under.
In the street he stood in a cold sweat of remorse. He knew the charges of negligence against Miss Anthony and Boylston were trumped up. He knew there was an answer to be made, and that he was the man to make it; and his eyes filled with tears of rage and self-pity at his own incompetence. But then he took heart at the thought of Boylston's astuteness and Miss Anthony's courage. They would not let themselves be beaten—probably they would fight their battle better without him. He tried to protect his retreat with such arguments, and when he got back to the studio he called up Mme. Lebel, and plunged again into his charcoal study of her head. He did not remember having ever worked with such supernatural felicity: it was as if that were his victorious answer to all their lies and intrigues. . .
But the Mayhew party was victorious too. How it came about a mind like Campton's could not grasp. Mr. Mayhew, it appeared, had let fall that a very large gift of money from the world-renowned philanthropist, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein (obtained through the good offices of Mmes. de Dolmetsch and Beausite) was contingent on certain immediate changes in the organization ("drastic changes" was Mr. Mayhew's phrase); and thereupon several hitherto passive members had suddenly found voice to assert the duty of not losing this gift. After that the way was clear. Adele Anthony and Boylston were offered ornamental posts which they declined, and within a week the Palais Royal saw them no more, and Paris drawing-rooms echoed with the usual rumours of committee wrangles and dark discoveries.
The episode left Campton with a bitter taste in his soul. It seemed to him like an ugly little allegory of Germany's manœuvring the world into war. The speciousness of Mr. Mayhew's arguments, the sleight-of-hand by which he had dislodged the real workers and replaced them by his satellites, reminded the painter of the neutrals who were beginning to say that there were two sides to every question, that war was always cruel, and how about the Russian atrocities in Silesia! As the months dragged on a breath of lukewarmness had begun to blow through the world, damping men's souls, confusing plain issues, casting a doubt on the worth of everything. People were beginning to ask what one knew, after all, of the secret motives which had impelled half-a-dozen self-indulgent old men ensconced in Ministerial offices to plunge the world in ruin. No one seemed to feel any longer that life is something more than being alive; apparently the only people not tired of the thought of death were the young men still pouring out to it in their thousands.
Still those thousands poured; still the young died; still, wherever Campton went, he met elderly faces, known and unknown, disfigured by grief, shrunken with renunciation. And still the months wore on without result.
One day in crossing the Tuileries he felt the same soft sparkle which, just about a year earlier, had abruptly stirred the sap in him. Yes—it was nearly a year since the day when he had noticed the first horse-chestnut blossoms, and been reminded by Mme. Lebel that he ought to buy some new shirts; and though to-day the horse-chestnuts were still leafless they were already misty with buds, and the tall white clouds above them full-uddered with spring showers. It was spring again, spring with her deluding promises—her gilding of worn stones and chilly water, the mystery of her distances, the finish and brilliance of her nearer strokes. Campton, in spite of himself, drank down the life-giving draught and felt its murmur in his veins. And just then, across the width of the gardens he saw, beyond a stretch of turf and clipped shrubs, two people, also motionless, who seemed to have the same cup at their lips. He recognized his son and Mrs. Talkett.
Their backs were toward him, and they stood close together, looking with the same eyes at the same sight: an Apollo touched with flying sunlight. After a while they walked on again, slowly and close to each other. George, as they moved, seemed now and then to point out some beauty of sculpture, or the colour of a lichened urn; and once they turned and took their fill of the great perspective tapering to the Arch—the Arch on which Rude's Mænad-Marseillaise still yelled her battalions on to death.