"Jingo! This thing sounds like money—as if I were a mighty rich man! I'll have to do something about this!"
But he wasn't overly upset, or even very greatly interested. His real concern had never been money; it had been, like Rousseau's and Millet's, to make the manifestation of life his first thought, to make a man really breathe, a tree really vegitate.
And so he went to the coast, as happy as a school-boy on a holiday. The sea fascinated him, and the faces of the men who go down to the sea in ships. It was going to be the happiest and most fruitful summer he had known for years. He bade the Hemingways a gay farewell. Mrs. Hemingway, he noted, looked at him speculatively. Her matrimonial plans for him had revived.
He worked gloriously. He ate like a school-boy, and slept like one, dreamlessly. What was happening in the outside world didn't interest him; what he had to do was to catch a little of the immortal and yet shifting loveliness of the world and imprison it on a piece of canvas. He didn't get any of the newspapers. When he smoked at night with his friend the curé, a gentle, philosophic old priest who had known a generation of painter-folk and loved this painter with a fatherly affection, he heard passing bits of world gossip. The priest took several papers, and liked to talk over with his artist friend what he had read. It was the priest, pale and perturbed, who told him that war was upon the world. Peter didn't believe it. In his heart he thought that the fear of war with her great neighbor had become a monomania with the French.
"It will be a bad war, the worst war the world has ever known. We shall suffer frightfully: but in the end we shall win," said the curé, walking up and down before his cottage. He fingered his beads as he spoke.
France began to mobilize. And then Peter Champneys realized that the French fear hadn't been so much a monomania as a foreknowledge. The thing stunned him. He wished to protest, to cry out against the monstrousness of what was happening. But his voice was a reed in a hurricane; he was a straw in a gigantic whirlpool. He felt his helplessness acutely.
He couldn't work any more; he couldn't sleep; he couldn't eat. There is a France that artists love more than they may ever love any woman. Peter Champneys knew that France. Nobody hated and loathed war more than he, born and raised in a land, and among a people, stripped and darkened by it. And that had been but a drop in the bucket, compared with what was now threatening France. He couldn't idly stand by and see that happen! He thought of all that France had given him, all that France meant to him. The faces of all those comrades of the Quartier rose before him; and gently, wistfully appealing, the sweet face of little lost Denise. He packed his paintings finished and unfinished, and went to tell his friend the curé farewell, bending his pagan knees to receive the old man's blessing. The curé, too, was part of that which is the spirit of France.
They were enlisting in the Quartier. Peter was one of very many. When the preliminaries were passed and he had put on the uniform of a private soldier of the republic, he felt rather a fool. He wasn't in the least enthusiastic. There was a thing to be done, and he meant to help in its accomplishment; but he wasn't going to shout over it or pretend that he liked doing it.
When he went to tell Mrs. Hemingway good-by, just before his regiment left, she put her arms around him and kissed him. She was going to stay in Paris, and Emma Campbell would stay in her house. Emma Campbell had been very silent. She had acute and very unpleasant recollections of one war. She didn't understand what this one was about, but she didn't like it. And when she saw Peter in uniform, saying good-by, going away to get himself killed, maybe, she broke into a whimper:
"Oh, Miss Maria! Oh, Miss Maria! Look at we-all chile! Oh, my Gawd, Miss Maria, we-all 's chile 's gwine to de war!"