Campton took coffee with them, bore with a little inevitable talk about the war, and then eagerly questioned the son. The young man was a chemist, a préparateur in the laboratory of the Institut Pasteur. He was also, it appeared, given to prehistoric archæology, and had written a “thesis” on the painted caves of the Dordogne. He seemed extremely serious, and absorbed in questions of science and letters. But it appeared to him perfectly simple to be leaving it all in a few hours to join his regiment. “The war had to come. This sort of thing couldn’t go on,” he said, in the words of Mme. Lebel.
He was to start in an hour, and Campton excused himself for intruding on the family, who seemed as happily united, as harmonious in their deeper interests, as if no musical studio-parties and exotic dancers had ever absorbed the master of the house.
Campton, looking at the group, felt a pang of envy, and thought, for the thousandth time, how frail a screen of activity divided him from depths of loneliness he dared not sound. “‘For every man hath business and desire,’” he muttered as he followed the physician.
In the consulting-room he explained: “It’s about my son——”
He had not been able to bring the phrase out in the presence of the young man who must have been just George’s age, and who was leaving in an hour for his regiment. But between Campton and the father there were complicities, and there might therefore be accommodations. In the consulting-room one breathed a lower air.
It was not that Campton wanted to do anything underhand. He was genuinely anxious about George’s health. After all, tuberculosis did not disappear in a month or even a year: his anxiety was justified. And then George, but for the stupid accident of his birth, would never have been mixed up in the war. Campton felt that he could make his request with his head high.
Fortin-Lescluze seemed to think so too; at any rate he expressed no surprise. But could anything on earth have surprised him, after thirty years in that confessional of a room?
The difficulty was that he did not see his way to doing anything—not immediately, at any rate.
“You must let the boy join his base. He leaves to-morrow? Give me the number of his regiment and the name of the town, and trust me to do what I can.”
“But you’re off yourself?”