Campton, having accepted Mr. Brant’s help, could hardly reproach his son for feeling grateful for it, and had therefore thought it “more decent” to postpone4 disparagement5 of their common benefactor6 till his own efforts had set them both free. Even then, it would be impossible to pay off the past—but the past might have been left to bury itself. Now his own wrath7 had dug it up, and he had paid for the brief joy of casting its bones in Mr. Brant’s face by a deep disgust at his own weakness.
All these things would have weighed on him even more if the outer weight of events had not been so much heavier. He had not returned to Mrs. Talkett’s since the banker’s visit; he did not wish to meet Jorgenstein, and his talk with the banker, and his visit to the clairvoyante, had somehow combined to send that whole factitious world tumbling about his ears. It was absurd to attach any importance to poor Olida’s vaticinations; but the vividness of her description of the baby-faced boy dying in a German hospital haunted Campton’s nights. If it were not the portrait of Benny Upsher it was at least that of hundreds and thousands of lads like him, who were thus groping and agonizing8 and stretching out vain hands, while in Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room well-fed men and expensive women heroically “forgot the war.” Campton, seeking to expiate9 his own brief forgetfulness by a passion of renewed activity, announced to Boylston the next afternoon that he was coming back to the office.
Boylston hardly responded: he looked up from his desk with a face so strange that Campton broke off to cry out: “What’s happened?”
The young man held out a newspaper. “They’ve done it—they’ve done it!” he shouted. Across the page the name of the Lusitania blazed out like the writing on the wall.
The Berserker light on Boylston’s placid10 features transformed him into an avenging11 cherub12. “Ah, now we’re in it—we’re in it at last!” he exulted13, as if the horror of the catastrophe14 were already swallowed up in its result. The two looked at each other without further words; but the older man’s first thought had been for his son. Now, indeed, America was “in it”: the gross tangible15 proof for which her government had forced her to wait was there in all its unimagined horror. Cant16 and cowardice17 in high places had drugged and stupefied her into the strange belief that she was too 255proud to fight for others; and here she was brutally18 forced to fight for herself. Campton waited with a straining heart for his son’s first comment on the new fact that they were “in it.”
But his excitement and Boylston’s exultation19 were short-lived. Before many days it became apparent that the proud nation which had flamed up overnight at the unproved outrage20 of the Maine was lying supine under the flagrant provocation21 of the Lusitania. The days which followed were, to many Americans, the bitterest of the war: to Campton they seemed the ironic2 justification22 of the phase of indifference23 and self-absorption through which he had just passed. He could not go back to Mrs. Talkett and her group; but neither could he take up his work with even his former zeal24. The bitter taste of the national humiliation25 was perpetually on his lips: he went about like a man dishonoured26.
He wondered, as the days and the weeks passed, at having no word from George. Had he refrained from writing because he too felt the national humiliation too deeply either to speak of it or to leave it unmentioned? Or was he so sunk in security that he felt only a mean thankfulness that nothing was changed? From such thoughts Campton’s soul recoiled27; but they lay close under the surface of his tenderness, and reared their evil heads whenever they caught him alone.
As the summer dragged itself out he was more and more alone. Dastrey, cured of his rheumatism28, had 256left the Ministry29 to resume his ambulance work. Miss Anthony was submerged under the ever-mounting tide of refugees. Mrs. Brant had taken a small house at Deauville (on the
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