“Thank the Lord,” he muttered, “I haven’t got the telephone anyhow!”

  He glanced cautiously down the wide stairs of the hotel to assure himself of a safe retreat; but in the hall an appealing voice detained him.

  “Dear Master! Dear great Master! I’ve been lying in wait for you!”

  A Red Cross nurse advanced: not the majestic figure of the Crimean legend, but the new version evolved in the rue de la Paix: short skirts, long ankles, pearls and curls. The face under the coif was young, wistful, haggard with the perpetual hurry of the aimless. Where had he seen those tragic eyes, so full of questions and so invariably uninterested in the answers?

  “I’m Madge Talkett—I saw you at—I saw you the day war was declared,” the young lady corrected herself. Campton remembered their meeting at Mrs. Brant’s, and was grateful for her evident embarrassment. So few of the new generation seemed aware that there were any privacies left to respect! He looked at Mrs. Talkett more kindly.

  “You must come,” she continued, laying her hand on his arm (her imperatives were always in italics). “Just a step from here—to my hospital. There’s someone asking for you.”

  “For me? Someone wounded?” What if it were Benny Upsher? A cold fear broke over Campton.

  “Someone dying,” Mrs. Talkett said. “Oh, nobody you know—a poor young French soldier. He was brought here two days ago . . . and he keeps on repeating your name . . .”

  “My name? Why my name?”

  “We don’t know. We don’t think he knows you . . . but he’s shot to pieces and half delirious. He’s a painter, and he’s seen pictures of yours, and keeps talking about them, and saying he wants you to look at his . . . You will come? It’s just next door, you know.”

  He did not know—having carefully avoided all knowledge of hospitals in his dread of being drawn into war-work, and his horror of coming as a mere spectator to gaze on agony he could neither comfort nor relieve. Hospitals were for surgeons and women; if he had been rich he would have given big sums to aid them; being unable to do even that, he preferred to keep aloof.

  He followed Mrs. Talkett out of the hotel and around the corner. The door of another hotel, with a big Red Cross above it, admitted them to a marble vestibule full of the cold smell of disinfectants. An orderly sat reading a newspaper behind the desk, and nurses whisked backward and forward with trays and pails. A lady with a bunch of flowers came down the stairs drying her eyes.

  Campton’s whole being recoiled from what awaited him. Since the poor youth was delirious, what was the use of seeing him? But women took a morbid pleasure in making one do things that were useless!

  On an upper floor they paused at a door where there was a moment’s parleying.

  “Come,” Mrs. Talkett said; “he’s a little better.”

  The room contained two beds. In one lay a haggard elderly man with closed eyes and lips drawn back from his clenched teeth. His legs stirred restlessly, and one of his arms was in a lifted sling attached to a horrible kind of gallows above the bed. It reminded Campton of Juan de Borgoña’s pictures of the Inquisition, in the Prado.

  “Oh, he’s all right; he’ll get well. It’s the other . . .”

  The other lay quietly in his bed. No gallows overhung him, no visible bandaging showed his wound. There was a flush on his young cheeks and his eyes looked out, large and steady, from their hollow brows. But he was the one who would not get well.

  Mrs. Talkett bent over him: her voice was sweet when it was lowered.

  “I’ve kept my promise. Here he is.”

  The eyes turned in the lad’s immovable head, and he and Campton looked at each other. The painter had never seen the face before him: a sharp irregular face, prematurely hollowed by pain, with thick chestnut hair tumbled above the forehead.

  “It’s you, Master!” the boy said.

  Campton sat down beside him. “How did you know? Have you seen me before?”

  “Once—at one of your exhibitions.” He paused and drew a hard breath. “But the first thing was the portrait at the Luxembourg . . . your son . . .”

  “Ah, you look like him!” Campton broke out.

  The eyes of the young soldier lit up. “Do I? . . . Someone told me he was your son. I went home from seeing that and began to paint. After the war, would you let me come and work with you? My things . . . wait . . . I’ll show you my things first.” He tried to raise himself. Mrs. Talkett slipped her arm under his shoulders, and resting against her he lifted his hand and pointed to the bare wall facing him.

  “There—there; you see? Look for yourself. The brushwork . . . not too bad, eh? I was . . . getting it . . . There, that head of my grandfather, eh? And my lame sister . . . Oh, I’m young . . .” he smiled . . . “never had any models . . . But after the war you’ll see . . .”

  Mrs. Talkett let him down again, and feverishly, vehemently, he began to describe, one by one, and over and over again, the pictures he saw on the naked wall in front of him.

  A nurse had slipped in, and Mrs. Talkett signed to Campton to follow her out. The boy seemed aware that the painter was going, and interrupted his enumeration to say: “As soon as the war’s over you’ll let me come?”

  “Of course I will,” Campton promised.

  In the passage he asked: “Can nothing save him? Has everything possible been done?”

  “Everything. We’re all so fond of him—the biggest surgeons have seen him. It seems he has great talent—but he never could afford models, so he has painted his family over and over again.” Mrs. Talkett looked at Campton with a good deal of feeling in her changing eyes. “You see, it did help, your coming. I know you thought it tiresome of me to insist.” She led him downstairs and into the office, where a lame officer with the Croix de Guerre sat at the desk. The officer wrote out the young soldier’s name—René Davril—and his family’s address.

  “They’re quite destitute, Monsieur. An old infirm grandfather, a lame sister who taught music, a widowed mother and several younger children . . .”

  “I’ll come back, I’ll come back,” Campton again promised as he parted from Mrs. Talkett.

  He had not thought it possible that he would ever feel so kindly toward her as at that moment. And then, a second later, she nearly spoiled it by saying: “Dear Master—you see the penalty of greatness!”

  The name of René Davril was with Campton all day. The boy had believed in him—his eyes had been opened by the sight of George’s portrait! And now, in a day or two more, he would be filling a three-by-six ditch in a crowded graveyard. At twenty—and with eyes like George’s.

  What could Campton do? No one was less visited by happy inspirations; the “little acts of kindness” recommended to his pious infancy had always seemed to him far harder to think of than to perform. But now some instinct carried him straight to the corner of his studio where he remembered having shoved out of sight a half-finished study for George’s portrait. He found it, examined it critically, scribbled his signature in one corner, and set out with it for the hospital. On the way he had to stop at the Ministry of War on Mayhew’s tiresome business, and was delayed there till too late to proceed with his errand before luncheon. But in the afternoon he passed in again through the revolving plate glass, and sent up his name. Mrs. Talkett was not there, but a nurse came down, to whom, with embarrassment, he explained himself.

  “Poor little Davril? Yes—he’s still alive. Will you come up? His family are with him.”

  Campton shook his head and held out the parcel. “It’s a picture he wanted——”

  The nurse promised it should be given. She looked at Campton with a vague benevolence, having evidently never heard his name; and the painter turned away with a cowardly sense that he ought to have taken the picture up himself. But to see the death-change on a face so like his son’s, and its look reflected in other anguished faces, was more than he could endure. He turned away.

  The next morning Mrs. Talkett wrote that René Davril was better, that the fever had dropped, and that he was lying quietly looking at the sketch. “The only thing that troubles him is that he realizes now that you have not seen his pictures. But he is very happy, and blesses you for your goodness.”

  His goodness! Campton, staring at the letter, could only curse himself for his stupidity. He saw now that the one thing which might have comforted the poor lad would have been to have his own pictures seen and judged; and that one thing, he, Campton, so many years vainly athirst for the approbation of the men he revered—that one thing he had never thought of doing! The only way of atoning for his negligence was instantly to go out to the suburb where the Davril family lived. Campton, without a scruple, abandoned Mr. Mayhew, with whom he had an appointment at the Embassy and another at the War Office, and devoted the rest of the day to the expedition. It was after six when he reached the hospital again; and when Mrs. Talkett came down he went up to her impetuously.

  “Well—I’ve seen them; I’ve seen his pictures, and he’s right. They’re astonishing! Awkward, still, and hesitating; but with such a sense of air and mass. He’ll do things—May I go up and tell him?”

  He broke off and looked at her.

  “He died an hour ago. If only you’d seen them yesterday!” she said.

  Chapter 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 an 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!”

  She seized his hands.

  “I heard from dear Madge Talkett that you were here, and I’ve asked her to leave us together.” She looked at him with ravaged eyes, as if just risen from a penitential vigil.

  “Come, please, into my little office: you didn’t know that I was the Infirmière-Major? My dear friend, what upheavals, what cataclysms! I see no one now: all my days and nights are given to my soldiers.”

  She glided ahead on noiseless sandals to a little room where a bowl of jade filled with gardenias, and a tortoise-shell box of gold-tipped cigarettes, stood on a desk among torn and discoloured livrets militaires. The room was empty, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, closing the door, drew Campton to a seat at her side. So close to her, he saw that the perfect lines of her face were flawed by marks of suffering. “The woman really has a heart,” he thought, “or the war couldn’t have made her so much handsomer.”

  Mme. de Dolmetsch leaned closer: a breath of incense floated from her conventual draperies.

  “I know why you came,” she continued; “you were good to that poor little Davril.” She clutched Campton suddenly with a blue-veined hand. “My dear friend, can anything justify such horrors? Isn’t it abominable that boys like that should be murdered? That some senile old beast of a diplomatist should decree, after a good dinner, that all we love best must be offered up?” She caught his hands again, her liturgical scent enveloping him. “Campton, I know you feel as I do.” She paused, pressing his fingers hard, her beautiful mouth trembling. “For God’s sake tell me,” she implored, “how you’ve managed to keep your son from the front!”

  Campton drew away, red and inarticulate. “I—my son? Those things depend on the authorities. My boy’s health . . .” he stammered.

  “Yes, yes; I know. Your George is delicate. But so is my Ladislas—dreadfully. The lungs too. I’ve trembled for him for so long; and now, at any moment . . .” Two tears gathered on her long lashes and rolled down . . . “at any moment he may be taken from the War Office, where he’s doing invaluable work, and forced into all that blood and horror; he may be brought back to me like those poor creatures up-stairs, who are hardly men any longer . . . mere vivisected animals, without eyes, without faces.” She lowered her voice and drew her lids together, so that her very eyes seemed to be whispering. “Ladislas has enemies who are jealous of him (I could give you their names); at this moment someone who ought to be at the front is intriguing to turn him out and get his place. Oh, Campton, you’ve known this terror—you know what one’s nights are like! Have pity—tell me how you managed!”

  He had no idea of what he answered, or how he finally got away. Everything that was dearest to him, the thought of George, the vision of the lad dying upstairs, was defiled by this monstrous coupling of their names with that of the supple middle-aged adventurer safe in his spotless uniform at the War Office. And beneath the boiling-up of Campton’s disgust a new fear lifted its head. How did Mme. de Dolmetsch know about George? And what did she know? Evidently there had been foolish talk somewhere. Perhaps it was Mrs. Brant—or perhaps Fortin himself. All these great doctors forgot the professional secret with some one woman, if not with many. Had not Fortin revealed to his own wife the reason of Campton’s precipitate visit? The painter escaped from Mme. de Dolmetsch’s scented lair, and from the sights and sounds of the hospital, in a state of such perturbation that for a while he stood in the street wondering where he had meant to go next.

  He had his own reasons for agreeing to the Davrils’ suggestion that the picture should be returned to him; and presently these reasons came back. “They’d never dare to sell it themselves; but why shouldn’t I sell it for them?” he had thought, remembering their denuded rooms, and the rusty smell of the women’s mourning. It cost him a pang to part with a study of his boy; but he was in a superstitious and expiatory mood, and eager to act on it.

  He remembered having been told by Boylston that “The Friends of French Art” had their office in the Palais Royal, and he made his way through the deserted arcades to the door of a once-famous restaurant.

  Behind the plate-glass windows young women with rolled-up sleeves and straw in their hair were delving in packing-cases, while, divided from them by an improvised partition, another group were busy piling on the cloak-room shelves garments such as had never before dishonoured them.

  Campton stood fascinated by the sight of the things these young women were sorting: pink silk combinations, sporting ulsters in glaring black and white checks, straw hats wreathed with last summer’s sunburnt flowers, high-heeled satin shoes split on the instep, and fringed and bugled garments that suggested obsolete names like “dolman” and “mantle,” and looked like the costumes dug out of a country-house attic by amateurs preparing to play “Caste.” Was it possible that “The Friends of French Art” proposed to clothe the families of fallen artists in these prehistoric properties?

  Boylston appeared, flushed and delighted (and with straw in his hair also), and led his visitor up a cork-screw stair. They passed a room where a row of people in shabby mourning like that of the Davril family sat on restaurant chairs before a caissière’s desk; and at the desk Campton saw Miss Anthony, her veil pushed back and a card-catalogue at her elbow, listening to a young woman who was dramatically stating her case.

  Boylston saw Campton’s surprise, and said: “Yes, we’re desperately short-handed, and Miss Anthony has deserted her refugees for a day or two to help me to straighten things out.”

  His own office was in a faded cabinet particulier where the dinner-table had been turned into a desk, and the weak-springed divan was weighed down under suits of ready-made clothes bearing the label of a wholesale clothier.

  “These are the things we really give them; but they cost a lot of money to buy,” Boylston explained. On the divan sat a handsomely dressed elderly lady with a long emaciated face and red eyes, who rose as they entered. Boylston spoke to her in an undertone and led her into another cabinet, where Campton saw her tragic figure sink down on the sofa, under a glass scrawled with amorous couplets.