“How can I tell——?” he grumbled doubtfully, looking from the faces of the two travellers to their unrecognizable photographs.
Mr. Brant was already feeling for his pocket, and furtively extracting a bank-note.
“For God’s sake—not that!” Campton cried, bringing his hand down on the banker’s. Leaning over, he spoke to the sentinel. “My son’s dying at the front. Can’t you see it when you look at me?”
The man looked, and slowly gave back the paper. “You can pass,” he said, shouldering his rifle.
The motor shot on, and the two men drew back into their corners. Mr. Brant fidgeted with his eye-glasses, and after an interval coughed again. “I must thank you,” he began, “for—for saving me just now from an inexcusable blunder. It was done mechanically ... one gets into the habit....”
“Quite so,” said Campton drily. “But there are cases——”
“Of course—of course.”
Silence fell once more. Mr. Brant sat bolt upright, his profile detached against the wintry fields. Campton, sunk into his corner, glanced now and then at the neat grey silhouette, in which the perpendicular glint of the eye-glass nearest him was the only point of light. He said to himself that the man was no doubt suffering horribly; but he was not conscious of any impulse of compassion. He and Mr. Brant were like two strangers pinned down together in a railway-smash: the shared agony did not bring them nearer. On the contrary, Campton, as the hours passed, felt himself more and more exasperated by the mute anguish at his side. What right had this man to be suffering as he himself was suffering, what right to be here with him at all? It was simply in the exercise of what the banker called his “habit”—the habit of paying, of buying everything, people and privileges and possessions—that he had acquired this ghastly claim to share in an agony which was not his.
“I shan’t even have my boy to myself on his deathbed,” the father thought in desperation; and the mute presence at his side became once more the symbol of his own failure.
The motor, with frequent halts, continued to crawl slowly on between lorries, field-kitchens, artillery wagons, companies of haggard infantry returning to their cantonments, and more and more vanloads of troops pressing forward; it seemed to Campton that hours elapsed before Mr. Brant again spoke.