Dastrey, in the last days of January, had been sent home from his ambulance with an attack of rheumatism1; and when it became clear that he could no longer be of use in the mud and cold of the army zone he had reluctantly taken his place behind a desk at the Ministry2 of War. The friends had dined early, so that he might get back to his night shift; and they sat over coffee and liqueurs, the mist of their cigars floating across lustrous3 cabinet-fronts and the worn gilding4 of slender consoles.
On the other side of the hearth5 young Boylston, sunk in an armchair, smoked and listened.
“It always comes back to the same thing,” Campton was saying nervously6. “What right have useless old men like me, sitting here with my cigar by this good fire, to preach blood and butchery to boys like George and your nephew?”
Again and again, during the days since Mrs. Brant’s visit, he had turned over in his mind the same torturing question. How was he to answer that last taunt7 of hers?
Not long ago, Paul Dastrey would have seemed the last person to whom he could have submitted such a 187problem. Dastrey, in the black August days, starting for the front in such a frenzy8 of baffled blood-lust, had remained for Campton the type of man with whom it was impossible to discuss the war. But three months of hard service in Postes de Secours and along the awful battle-edge had sent him home with a mind no longer befogged by personal problems. He had done his utmost, and knew it; and the fact gave him the professional calm which keeps surgeons and nurses steady through all the horrors they are compelled to live among. Those few months had matured and mellowed9 him more than a lifetime of Paris.
He leaned back with half-closed lids, quietly considering his friend’s difficulty.
“I see. Your idea is that, being unable to do even the humble10 kind of job that I’ve been assigned to, you’ve no right not to try to keep your boy out of it if you can?”
“Well—by any honourable11 means.”
Dastrey laughed faintly, and Campton reddened. “The word’s not happy, I admit.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that: I was considering how the meaning had evaporated out of lots of our old words, as if the general smash-up had broken their stoppers. So many of them, you see,” said Dastrey smiling, “we’d taken good care not to uncork for centuries. Since I’ve been on the edge of what’s going on fifty miles from here a good many of my own words have lost their 188meaning, and I’m not prepared to say where honour lies in a case like yours.” He mused13 a moment, and then went on: “What would George’s view be?”
Campton did not immediately reply. Not so many weeks ago he would have welcomed the chance of explaining that George’s view, thank God, had remained perfectly14 detached and objective, and that the cheerful acceptance of duties forcibly imposed on him had not in the least obscured his sense of the fundamental injustice15 of his being mixed up in the thing at all.
But how could he say this now? If George’s view were still what his father had been in the habit of saying it was, then he held that view alone: Campton himself no longer thought that any civilized16 man could afford to stand aside from such a conflict.
“As far as I know,” he said, “George hasn’t changed his mind.”
Boylston stirred in his armchair, knocked the ash from his cigar, and looked up at the ceiling.
“Whereas you——” Dastrey suggested.
“Yes,” said Campton. “I feel differently. You speak of the difference of having been in contact with what’s going on out there. But how can anybody not be in contact, who has any imagination, any sense of right and wrong? Do these pictures and hangings ever shut it out from you—or those books over there, when you turn to them after your day’s work? Perhaps they do, because you’ve got a real job, a job you’ve been ordered to do, 189and can’t not do. But for a useless drifting devil like me—my God, the sights and the sounds of it are always with me!”
“There are a good many people who wouldn’t call you useless, Mr. Campton,” said Boylston.
Campton shook his head. “I wish there were any healing in the kind of thing I’m doing; perhaps there is to you, to whom it appears to come naturally to love your kind.” (Boylston laughed.) “Service is of no use without conviction: that’s one of the uncomfortable truths this stir-up has brought to the surface. I was meant to paint pictures in a world at peace, and I should have more respect for myself if I could go on unconcernedly doing it, instead of pining to be in all the places where I’m not wanted, and should be of no earthly use. That’s why——” he paused, looked about him, and sought understanding in Dastrey’s friendly gaze: “That’s why I respect George’s opinion, which really consists in not having any, and simply doing without comment the work assigned to him. The whole thing is so far beyond human measure that one’s individual rage and revolt seem of no more use than a woman’s scream at an accident she isn’t in.”
Even while he spoke17, Campton knew he was arguing only against himself. He did not in the least believe that any individual sentiment counted for nothing at such a time, and Dastrey really spoke for him in rejoining: “Every one can at least contribute an attitude: 190as you have, my dear fellow. Boylston’s here to confirm it.”
Boylston grunted18 his assent19.
“An attitude—an attitude?” Campton retorted. “The word is revolting to me! Anything a man like me can do is too easy to be worth doing. And as for anything one can say: how dare one say anything, in the face of what is being done out there to keep this room and this fire, and this ragged20 end of life, safe for such survivals as you and me?” He crossed to the table to take another cigar. As he did so he laid an apologetic pressure on his host’s shoulder. “Men of our age are the chorus of the tragedy, Dastrey; we can’t help ourselves. As soon as I open my lips to blame or praise I see myself in white petticoats, with a long beard held on by an elastic21, goading22 on the combatants in a cracked voice from a safe corner of the ramparts. On the whole I’d sooner be spinning among the women.”
“Well,” said Dastrey, getting up, “I’ve got to get back to my spinning at the Ministry; where, by the way, there are some very pretty young women at the distaff. It’s extraordinary how much better pretty girls type than plain ones; I see now why they get all the jobs.”
The three went out into the winter blackness. They were used by this time to the new Paris: to extinguished lamps, shuttered windows, deserted23 streets, the 191almost total cessation of wheeled traffic. All through the winter, life had seemed in suspense24 everywhere, as much on the battle-front as in the rear. Day after day, week after week, of rain and
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