One appeal, however, he had not been able to avoid. About two months earlier he had had a visit from George’s friend Boylston, the youth he had met at Dastrey’s dinner the night before war was declared. In the interval he had entirely forgotten Boylston; but as soon as he saw the fat brown young man with a twinkle in his eyes and his hair, Campton recalled him, and held out a cordial hand. Had not George said the Boylston was the best fellow he knew?
Boylston seemed much impressed by the honour of waiting on the great man. In spite of his cool twinkling air he was evidently full of reverence for the things and people he esteemed, and Campton’s welcome sent the blood up to the edge of his tight curls. It also gave him courage to explain his visit.
He had come to beg Campton to accept the chairmanship of the American Committee of “The Friends of French Art,” an international group of painters who proposed to raise funds for the families of mobilised artists. The American group would naturally be the most active, since Americans had, in larger numbers than any other foreigners, sought artistic training in France; and all the members agreed that Campton’s name must figure at their head. But Campton was known to be inaccessible, and the committee, aware that Boylston was a friend of George’s, had asked him to transmit their request.
“You see, sir, nobody else represents…”
Campton thought as seldom as possible of what followed: he hated the part he had played. But, after all, what else could he have done? Everything in him recoiled from what acceptance would bring with it: publicity, committee meetings, speechifying, writing letters, seeing troublesome visitors, hearing harrowing stories, asking people for money-—above all, having to give his own; a great deal of his own.
He stood before the young man, abject, irresolute, chinking a bunch of keys in his trouser-pocket, and remembering afterward that the chink must have sounded as if it were full of money. He remembered too, oddly enough, that as his own embarrassment increased Boylston’s vanished. It was as though the modest youth, taking his host’s measure, had reluctantly found him wanting, and from that moment had felt less in awe of his genius. Illogical, of course, and unfair—but there it was.
The talk had ended by Campton’s refusing the chairmanship, but agreeing to let his name figure on the list of honorary members, where he hoped it would be overshadowed by rival glories. And, having reached this conclusion, he had limped to his desk, produced a handful of notes, and after a moment’s hesitation held out two hundred francs with the stereotyped: “Sorry I can’t make it more…”
He had meant it to be two hundred and fifty; but, with his usual luck, all his fumbling had failed to produce a fifty-franc note; and he could hardly ask Boylston to “make the change.”
On the threshold the young man paused to ask for the last news of George; and on Campton’s assuring him that it was excellent, added, with evident sincerity: “Still hung up on that beastly staff-job? I do call that hard luck” And now, of all the unpleasant memories of the visit, that phrase kept the sharpest sting.
Was it in fact hard luck? And did George himself think so? There was nothing in his letters to show it. He seemed to have undergone no change of view as to his own relation to the war; he had shown no desire to “be in it,” as that mad young Upsher said.
For the first time since he had seen George’s train pull out of the Gare de l’Est Campton found himself wondering at the perfection of his son’s moral balance. So many thing had happened since; war had turned out to be so immeasurably more hideous and abominable than those who most abhorred war had dreamed it could be; the issues at stake had become so glaringly plain, right and wrong, honour and dishonour, humanity and savagery faced each other so squarely across the trenches, that it seemed strange to Campton that his boy, so eager, so impressionable, so quick on the uptake, should not have felt some such burst of wrath as had driven even poor Jules Lebel into the conflict.
The comparison, of course, was absurd. Lebel had been parted from his dearest, his wife dragged to prison, his child virtually murdered: any man, in his place, must have felt the blind impulse to kill. But what was Lebel’s private plight but a symbol of the larger wrong? This war could no longer be compared to other wars: Germany was conducting it on methods that civilization had made men forget. The occupation of Luxembourg; the systematic destruction of Belgium; the savage treatment of the people of the invaded regions; the outrages of Louvain and Rheims and Ypres; the voice with which these offences cried to heaven had waked the indignation of humanity. Yet George, in daily contact with all this woe and ruin, seemed as unmoved as though he had been behind a desk in the New York office of Bullard and Brant.
If there were any change in his letters it was rather that they were more indifferent. His reports of himself became drier, more stereotyped, his comments on the situation fewer: he seemed to have been subdued to the hideous business he worked in. It was true that his letters had never been expressive: his individuality seemed to dry up in contact with pen and paper. It was true also that letters from the front were severely censored, and that it would have been foolish to put in them anything likely to prevent their delivery. But George had managed to send several notes by hand, and these were as colourless as the others; and so were his letters to his mother, which Mrs. Brant always sent to Miss Anthony, who privately passed them on to Campton.
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
Délégué 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 diverse 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.
Harvey Mayhew—Harvey Mayhew with a pen-stroke through the title which, so short a time since, it had been his chief ambition to display on his cards! No wonder it embarrassed him now. But where on earth had he been all this time? As Campton pondered on the card a memory flashed out. Mayhew? Mayhew? Why, wasn’t it Mayhew who had waylaid him in the Crillon a few hours before war was declared, to
ask his advice about the safest way of travelling to the Hague? And hadn’t he, Campton, in all good faith, counselled him to go by Luxembourg “in order to be out of the way of trouble”?
The remembrance swept away the painter’s sombre thoughts, and he burst into a laugh that woke the echoes of the studio.
XII.
Not having it in his power to call up his cousin on the telephone, Campton went the next morning to the Nouveau Luxe.
It was the first time that he had entered the famous hotel since the beginning of the war; and at sight of the long hall his heart sank as it used to whenever some untoward necessity forced him to run its deadly blockade.
But the hall was empty when he entered, empty not only of the brilliant beings who filled his soul with such dismay, but also of the porters, footmen and lift-boys who, even in its unfrequented hours, lent it the lustre of their liveries.
A tired concierges sat at the desk and near the door a boy scout, coiling his bare legs about a high stool, raised his head languidly from his book. But for these two, the world of the Nouveau Luxe had disappeared.
As the lift was not running there was nothing to disturb their meditations; and when Campton had learned that Mr. Mayhew would receive him he started alone up the deserted stairs.
Only a few dusty trunks remained in the corridors where luggage used to be piled as high as in the passages of the great liners on sailing-day; and instead of the murmur of ladies’-maids’ skirts, and explosions of laughter behind glazed service-doors, the swish of a charwoman’s mop alone broke the silence.
“After all,” Campton thought, “if war didn’t kill people how much pleasanter it might make the world!”
This was evidently not the opinion of Mr. Harvey Mayhew, whom he found agitatedly pacing a large room hung in shrimp-pink brocade, which opened on a vista of turquoise tiling and porcelain tub.
Mr. Mayhew’s round countenance, composed of the same simple curves as his nephew’s, had undergone a remarkable change. He was still round, but he was ravaged. His fringe of hair had grown greyer, and there were crow’s-feet about his blue eyes, and wrathful corrugations in his benignant forehead.
He seized Campton’s hands and glared at him through indignant eye-glasses.
“My dear fellow, I looked you up as soon as I arrived. I need you—we all need you—we need your powerful influence and your worldwide celebrity. Campton, the day for words has gone by. We must act!”
Campton let himself down into an armchair. No verb in the language terrified him as much as that which his cousin had flung at him. He gazed at the ex-Delegate with dismay. “I didn’t know you were here. Where have you come from?” he asked.
Mr. Mayhew, resting a manicured hand on the edge of a gilt table, looked down awfully on him.
“I come,” he said, “from a German prison.”
“Good Lord—you?” Campton gasped.
He continued to gaze at his cousin with terror, but of a new kind. Here at last was someone who had actually been in the jaws of the monster, who had seen, heard, suffered—a witness who could speak of that which he knew! No wonder Mr. Mayhew took himself seriously—at last he had something to be serious about! Campton stared at him as if he had risen from the dead.
Mr. Mayhew cleared his throat and went on: “You may remember our meeting at the Crillon—on the 31st of last July it was—and my asking you the best way of getting to the Hague, in view of impending events. At that time” (his voice took a note of irony) “I was a Delegate to the Peace Congress at the Hague, and conceived it to be my duty to carry out my mandate at whatever personal risk. You advised me—as you may also remember—in order to be out of the way of trouble, to travel by Luxembourg,” (Campton stirred uneasily). “I followed your advice; and, not being able to go by train, I managed, with considerable difficulty, to get permission to travel by motor. I reached Luxembourg as the German army entered it—the next day I was in a German prison.”
The next day! Then this pink-and-white man who stood there with his rimless eye-glasses and neatly trimmed hair, and his shining nails reflected in the plate glass of the table-top, this perfectly typical, usual sort of harmless rich American, had been for four months in the depths of the abyss that men were beginning to sound with fearful hearts!
“It is a simple miracle,” said Mr. Mayhew, “that I was not shot as a spy.”
Campton’s voice choked in his throat. “Where were you imprisoned?”
“The first night, in the Police commissariat, with common thieves and vagabonds—with—” Mr. Mayhew lowered his voice and his eyes: “With prostitutes, Campton…”
He waited for this to take effect, and continued: “The next day, in consequence of the energetic intervention of our consul—who behaved extremely well, as I have taken care to let them know in Washington—I was sent back to my hotel on parole, and kept there, kept there, Campton—I, the official representative of a friendly country—under strict police surveillance, like … like an unfortunate woman … for eight days: a week and one day over!”
Mr. Mayhew sank into a chair and passed a scented handkerchief across his forehead. “When I was finally released I was without money, without luggage, without my motor or my wretched chauffeur—a Frenchman, who had been instantly carried off to Germany. In this state of destitution, and without an apology, I was shipped to Rotterdam and put on a steamer sailing for America.” He wiped his forehead again, and the corners of his agitated lips. “Peace, Campton—Peace? When I think that I believed in a thing called Peace! That I left Utica—always a difficult undertaking for me—because I deemed it my duty, in the interests of Peace,” (the word became a hiss) “to travel to the other side of the world, and use the weight of my influence and my experience in such a cause!”
He clenched his fist and shook it in the face of an invisible foe.
“My influence, if I have any; my experience—ha, I have had experience now, Campton! And, my God, sir, they shall both be used till my last breath to show up these people, to proclaim to the world what they really are, to rouse public opinion in America against a nation of savages who ought to be hunted off the face of the globe like vermin-like the vermin in their own prison cells! Campton—if I may say so without profanity—I come to bring not Peace but a Sword!”
It was some time before the flood of Mr. Mayhew’s wrath subsided, or before there floated up from its agitated depths some fragments of his subsequent history and present intentions. Eventually, however, Campton gathered that after a short sojourn in America, where he found opinion too lukewarm for him, he had come back to Europe to collect the experiences of other victims of German savagery. Mr. Mayhew, in short, meant to devote himself to Atrocities; and he had sought out Campton to ask his help, and especially to be put in contact with persons engaged in refugee-work, and likely to have come across flagrant offences against the law of nations.
It was easy to comply with the latter request. Campton scribbled a message to Adele Anthony at her refugee Depot; and he undertook also to find out from what officials Mr. Mayhew might obtain leave to visit the front.
“I know it’s difficult” he began; but Mr. Mayhew laughed. “I am here to surmount difficulties—after what I’ve been through!”
It was not until then that Mr. Mayhew found time to answer an enquiry about his nephew.
“Benny Upsher? Ha—I’m proud of Benny! He’s a hero, that nephew of mine—he was always my favourite.”
He went on to say that the youth, having failed to enlist in the French army, had managed to get back to England, and there, passing himself off as a Canadian (“Born at Murray Bay, sir—wasn’t it lucky?”) had joined an English regiment, and, after three months’ training, was now on his way to the front. His parents had made a great outcry—moved heaven and earth for news of him—but the boy had covered up his tracks so cleverly that they had had no word till he was starting for Boulogne with his draft. Rather high-handed—and poor Madeline had nearly gone out of he
r mind; but Mr. Mayhew confessed he had no patience with such feminine weakness. “Benny’s a man, and must act as a man. That boy, Campton, saw things as they were from the first.”
Campton took leave, dazed and crushed by the conversation. It was all one to him if Harvey Mayhew chose to call on America to avenge his wrongs; Campton himself was beginning to wish that his country would wake up to what was going on in the world; but that he, Campton, should be drawn into the affair, should have to write letters, accompany the ex-Delegate to Embassies and Red Crosses, languish with him in ministerial antechambers, and be deafened with appeals to his own celebrity and efficiency; that he should have ascribed to himself that mysterious gift of “knowing the ropes” in which his whole blundering career had proved him to be cruelly lacking: this was so dreadful to him as to obscure every other question.
“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.
Edith Wharton - Novel 14 Page 10
