“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 understaffed 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 armchair beside the table with its monumental bronze inkstand. Finally, from above, a maid called to Campton to ascend.