“And he’s not hers either, that I know of!”
Boylston seemed to hesitate. “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it, sir? You’ve had him; you have him still. Nobody can touch that fact, or take it from you. Every hour of his life was yours. But they’ve never had anything, those two others, Mr. Brant and Miss Anthony; nothing but a reflected light. And so every outward sign means more to them. I’m putting it badly, I know——”
Campton held out his hand. “You don’t mean to, I suppose. But better not put it at all. Good night,” he said. And on the threshold he called out sardonically: “And who’s going to pay for a monument, I’d like to know?”
A monument—they wanted a monument! Wanted him to decide about it, plan it, perhaps design it—good Lord, he didn’t know! No doubt it all seemed simple enough to them: anything did, that money could buy.... When he couldn’t yet bear to turn that last canvas out from the wall, or look into the old portfolio even.... Suffering, suffering! What did they any of them know about suffering? Going over old photographs, comparing studies, recalling scenes and sayings, discussing with some sculptor or other the shape of George’s eyelids, the spring of his chest-muscles, the way his hair grew and his hands moved—why, it was like digging him up again out of that peaceful corner of the Neuilly cemetery where at last he was resting, like dragging him back to the fret and the fever, and the senseless roar of the guns that still went on.
And then: as he’d said to Boylston, who was to pay for their monument? Even if the making of it had struck him as a way of getting nearer to his boy, instead of building up a marble wall between them—even if the idea had appealed to him, he hadn’t a penny to spare for such an undertaking. In the first place, he never intended to paint again for money; never intended to do anything but these gaunt and serious or round and babyish young American faces above their stiff military collars, and when their portraits were finished to put them away, locked up for his own pleasure; and what he had earned in the last years was to be partly for these young men—for their reading-rooms, clubs, recreation centres, whatever was likely to give them temporary rest and solace in the grim months to come; and partly for such of the protégés of “The Friends of French Art” as had been deprived of aid under the new management. Tales of private jealousy and petty retaliation came to Campton daily, now that Mme. Beausite administered the funds; Adele Anthony and Mlle. Davril, bursting with the wrongs of their pensioners, were always appealing to him for help. And then, hidden behind these more or less valid reasons, the old instinctive dread of spending had reasserted itself, he couldn’t tell how or why, unless through some dim opposition to the Brants’ perpetual outpouring: their hospitals, their motors, their bribes, their orchids, and now their monument—their monument!
He sought refuge from it all with his soldiers, haunting for hours every day one of the newly-opened Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Clubs. Adele Anthony had already found a job there, and was making a success of it. She looked twenty years older since George was gone, but she stuck to her work with the same humorous pertinacity; and with her mingled heartiness and ceremony, her funny resuscitation of obsolete American slang, and her ability to answer all their most disconcerting questions about Paris and France (Montmartre included), she easily eclipsed the ministering angels who twanged the home-town chord and called them “boys.”
The young men appeared to return Campton’s liking; it was as if they had guessed that he needed them, and wanted to offer him their shy help. He was conscious of something rather protecting in their attitude, of his being to them a vague unidentified figure, merely “the old gentleman” who was friendly to them; but he didn’t mind. It was enough to sit and listen to their talk, to try and clear up a few of the countless puzzles which confronted them, to render them such fatherly services as he could, and in the interval to jot down notes of their faces—their inexhaustibly inspiring faces. Sometimes to talk with them was like being on the floor in George’s nursery, among the blocks and the tin soldiers; sometimes like walking with young archangels in a cool empty heaven; but wherever he was he always had the sense of being among his own, the sense he had never had since George’s death.
To think of them all as George’s brothers, to study out the secret likeness to him in their young dedicated faces: that was now his one passion, his sustaining task; it was at such times that his son came back and sat among them....
Gradually, as the weeks passed, the first of his new friends, officers and soldiers, were dispersed throughout the training camps, and new faces succeeded to those he had tried to fix on his canvas; an endless line of Benny Upshers, baby-Georges, schoolboy Boylstons, they seemed to be. Campton saw each one go with a fresh pang, knowing that every move brought them so much nearer to the front, that ever-ravening and inexorable front. They were always happy to be gone; and that only increased his pain. Now and then he attached himself more particularly to one of the young men, because of some look of the eyes or some turn of the mind like George’s; and then the parting became anguish.