“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——