Mme. Lebel caught sight of Campton, smoothed herself and stood up also.
“I had found him a wife—a strong healthy girl with a good dot. There go my last great-grandchildren! For the other will be killed too. I don’t understand any more, do you?” She made an automatic attempt to straighten the things on the table, but her hands beat the air and George had to lead her downstairs.
It was that day that Campton said to himself: “We shan’t keep him in Paris much longer.” But the heavy weeks of spring and summer passed, the inconclusive conflict at the front went on with its daily toll of dead, and George still stuck to his job. Campton, during this time, continued to avoid the Brants as much as possible. His wife’s conversation was intolerable to him; her obtuse optimism, now that she had got her son back, was even harder to bear than the guiltily averted glance of Mr. Brant, between whom and Campton their last talk had hung a lasting shadow of complicity.
But most of all Campton dreaded to meet the Talketts; the wife with her flushed cheek-bones and fixed eyes, the husband still affably and continuously arguing against Philistinism. One afternoon the painter stumbled on them, taking tea with George in Boylston’s little flat; but he went away again, unable to bear the interminable discussion between Talkett and Boylston, and the pacifist’s reiterated phrase: “To borrow one of my wife’s expressions”—while George, with a closed brooding face, sat silent, laughing drily now and then. What a different George from the one his father had found, in silence also, kneeling beside Mme. Lebel!
Once again Campton was vouchsafed a glimpse of that secret George. He had walked back with his son after the funeral mass for young Lebel; and in the porter’s lodge of the Avenue Marigny they found a soldier waiting—a young square-built fellow, with a shock of straw-coloured hair above his sunburnt rural face. Campton was turning from the door when George dashed past him, caught the young man by both shoulders, and shouted out his name. It was that of the orderly who had carried him out of the firing-line and hunted him up the next day in the Doullens hospital. Campton saw the look the two exchanged: it lasted only for the taking of a breath; a moment later officer and soldier were laughing like boys, and the orderly was being drawn forth to shake hands with Campton. But again the glance was an illumination; it came straight from that far country, the Benny Upsher country, which Campton so feared to see in his son’s eyes.
The orderly had been visiting his family, fugitives from the invaded regions who had taken shelter in one of Adele Anthony’s suburban colonies. He had obtained permission to stop in Paris on his way back to the front; and for two joyful days he was lodged and feasted in the Avenue Marigny. Boylston provided him with an evening at Montmartre, George and Mrs. Brant took him to the theatre and the cinema, and on the last day of his leave Adele Anthony invited him to tea with Campton, Mr. Brant and Boylston. Mr. Brant, as they left this entertainment, hung back on the stairs to say in a whisper to Campton: “The family are provided for—amply. I’ve asked George to mention the fact to the young man; but not until just as he’s starting.”
Campton nodded. For George’s sake he was glad; yet he could not repress a twinge of his dormant jealousy. Was it always to be Brant who thought first of the things to make George happy—always Brant who would alone have the power to carry them out?
“But he can’t prevent that poor fellow’s getting killed to-morrow,” Campton thought almost savagely, as the young soldier beamed forth from the taxi in which George was hurrying him to the station.
It was not many days afterward that George looked in at the studio early one morning. Campton, over his breakfast, had been reading the communiqué. There was heavy news from Verdun; from east to west the air was dark with calamity; but George’s face had the look it had worn when he greeted his orderly.