“He died an hour ago. If only you’d seen them yesterday!” she said.
XIII
The killing of René Davril seemed to Campton one of the most senseless crimes the war had yet perpetrated. It brought home to him, far more vividly than the distant death of poor Jean Fortin, what an incalculable sum of gifts and virtues went to make up the monster’s daily meal.
“Ah, you want genius, do you? Mere youth’s not enough ... and health and gaiety and courage; you want brains in the bud, imagination and poetry, ideas all folded up in their sheath! It takes that, does it, to tempt your jaded appetite?” He was reminded of the rich vulgarians who will eat only things out of season. “That’s what war is like,” he muttered savagely to himself.
The next morning he went to the funeral with Mrs. Talkett—between whom and himself the tragic episode had created a sort of improvised intimacy—walking at her side through the November rain, behind the poor hearse with the tricolour over it.
At the church, while the few mourners shivered in a damp side chapel, he had time to study the family: a poor sobbing mother, two anæmic little girls, and the lame sister who was musical—a piteous group, smelling of poverty and tears. Behind them, to his surprise, he saw the curly brown head and short-sighted eyes of Boylston. Campton wondered at the latter’s presence; then he remembered “The Friends of French Art,” and concluded that the association had probably been interested in poor Davril.
With some difficulty he escaped from the thanks of the mother and sisters, and picked up a taxi to take Mrs. Talkett home.
“No—back to the hospital,” she said. “A lot of bad cases have come in, and I’m on duty again all day.” She spoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world; and he shuddered at the serenity with which women endure the unendurable.
At the hospital he followed her in. The Davril family, she told him, had insisted that they had no claim on his picture, and that it must be returned to him. Mrs. Talkett went up to fetch it; and Campton waited in one of the drawing-rooms. A step sounded behind him, and another nurse came in—but was it a nurse, or some haloed nun from a Umbrian triptych, her pure oval framed in white, her long fingers clasping a book and lily?
“Mme. de Dolmetsch!” he cried; and thought: “A new face again—what an artist!”