There was reason to believe that George’s regiment had been sent to Verdun, and from Verdun the news was growing daily more hopeful. This seemed to Mrs. Brant a remarkable confirmation of Olida’s prophecy. Apparently it did not occur to her that, in the matter of human life, victories may be as ruinous as defeats; and she triumphed in the fact—it had grown to be a fact to her—that her boy was at Verdun, when he might have been in the Somme, where things, though stagnant, were on the whole going less well. Mothers prayed for “a quiet sector”—and then, she argued, what happened? The men grew careless, the officers were oftener away; your son was ordered out to see to the repairs of a barbed wire entanglement, and a sharpshooter picked him off while you were sitting reading one of his letters, and thinking: “Thank God he’s out of the fighting.” And besides, Olida was sure, and all her predictions had been so wonderful....
Campton began to dread his wife’s discovering Mme. Olida’s fears for her own son. Every endeavour to get news of Pepito had been fruitless; finally Campton and Boylston concluded that the young man must be a prisoner. The painter had a second visit from Mme. Olida, in the course of which he besought her (without naming Julia) to be careful not to betray her private anxiety to the poor women who came to her for consolation; and she fixed her tortured velvet eyes on him reproachfully.
“How could you think it of me, Juanito? The money I earn is for my boy! That gives me the strength to invent a new lie every morning.”
He took her fraudulent hand and kissed it.
The next afternoon he met Mrs. Brant walking down the Champs Elysées with her light girlish step. She lifted a radiant face to his. “A letter from George this morning! And, do you know, Olida prophesied it? I was there again yesterday; and she told me that he would soon be back, and that at that very moment she could see him writing to me. You’ll admit it’s extraordinary? So many mothers depend on her—I couldn’t live without her. And her messages from her own son are so beautiful——”
“From her own son?”
“Yes: didn’t I tell you? He says such perfect things to her. And she confessed to me, poor woman, that before the war he hadn’t always been kind: he used to take her money, and behave badly. But now every day he sends her a thought-message—such beautiful things! She says she wouldn’t have the courage to keep us all up if it weren’t for the way that she’s kept up by her boy. And now,” Julia added gaily, “I’m going to order the cakes for my bridge-tea this afternoon. You know I promised Georgie I wouldn’t give up my bridge-teas.”
Now and then Campton returned to his latest portrait of his son; but in spite of George’s frequent letters, in spite of the sudden drawing together of father and son during their last moments at the station, the vision of the boy George, the careless happy George who had ridiculed the thought of war and pursued his millennial dreams of an enlightened world—that vision was gone. Sometimes Campton fancied that the letters themselves increased this effect of remoteness. They were necessarily more guarded than the ones written, before George’s wounding, from an imaginary H.Q.; but that did not wholly account for the difference. Campton, in the last analysis, could only say that his vision of his boy was never quite in focus. Either—as in the moment when George had comforted Mme. Lebel, or greeted his orderly, or when he had said those last few broken words at the station—he seemed nearer than ever, seemed part and substance of his father; or else he became again that beautiful distant apparition, the wingèd sentry guarding the Unknown.