Besides, there were other means of comparison. People with sons at the front were beginning to hand about copies of their letters; a few passages, strangely moving and beautiful, had found their way into the papers. George, God be praised, was not at the front; but he was in the war-zone, far nearer the sights and sounds of death than his father, and he had comrades and friends in the trenches. Strange that what he wrote was still so cold to the touch....
“It’s the scientific mind, I suppose,” Campton reflected. “These youngsters are all rather like beautifully made machines....” Yet it had never before struck him that his son was like a beautifully made machine.
He remembered that he had not dined, and got up wearily. As he passed out he noticed on a pile of letters and papers a brand-new card: he could always tell the new cards by their whiteness, which twenty-four hours of studio-dust turned to grey.
Campton held the card to the light. It was large and glossy, a beautiful thick pre-war card; and on it was engraved:
HARVEY MAYHEW
Déléguê des Etats Unis au Congrès de la Paix
with a pen-stroke through the lower line. Beneath was written an imperative “p.t.o.”; and reversing the card, Campton read, in an agitated hand: “Must see you at once. Call up Nouveau Luxe”; and, lower down: “Excuse ridiculous card. Impossible get others under six weeks.”
So Mayhew had turned up! Well, it was a good thing: perhaps he might bring news of that mad Benny Upsher whose doings had caused Campton so much trouble in the early days that he could never recall the boy’s obstinate rosy face without a stir of irritation.
“I want to be in this thing——” Well, young Upsher had apparently been in it with a vengeance; but what he had cost Campton in cables to his distracted family, and in weary pilgrimages to the War Office, the American Embassy, the Consulate, the Prefecture of Police, and divers other supposed sources of information, the painter meant some day to tell his young relative in no measured terms. That is, if the chance ever presented itself; for, since he had left the studio that morning four months ago, Benny had so completely vanished that Campton sometimes wondered, with a little shiver, if they were ever likely to exchange words again in this world.
“Mayhew will know; he wants to tell me about the boy, I suppose,” he mused.