Campton went home to his studio.  
He still lived there, shiftlessly and uncomfortably—for Mariette had never come back from Lille. She had not come back, and there was no news of her. Lille had become a part of the “occupied provinces,” from which there was no escape; and people were beginning to find out what that living burial meant.
 
Adele Anthony had urged Campton to go back to the hotel, but he obstinately¹ refused. What business had he to be living in expensive hotels when, for the Lord knew how long, his means of earning a livelihood³ were gone, and when it was his duty to save up for George—George, who was safe, who was definitely out of danger, and whom he longed more than ever, when the war was over, to withdraw from the stifling⁴ atmosphere of his stepfather’s millions?
 
He had been so near to having the boy to himself when the war broke out! He had almost had in sight the proud day when he should be able to say: “Look here: this is your own bank-account. Now you’re independent—for God’s sake stop and consider what you want to do with your life.”
 
The war had put an end to that—but only for a time. If victory came before long, Campton’s reputation would survive the eclipse, his chances of money-making 123would be as great as ever, and the new George, the George matured and disciplined by war, would come back with a finer sense of values, and a soul steeled against the vulgar opportunities of wealth.
 
Meanwhile, it behoved his father to save every penny. And the simplest way of saving was to go on camping in the studio, taking his meals at the nearest wine-shop, and entrusting⁶ his bed-making and dusting to old Mme. Lebel. In that way he could live for a long time without appreciably⁷ reducing his savings⁸.
 
Mme. Lebel’s daughter-in-law, Mme. Jules, who was in the Ardennes with the little girl when the war broke out, was to have replaced Mariette. But, like Mariette, Mme. Jules never arrived, and no word came from her or the child. They too were in an occupied province. So Campton jogged on without a servant. It was very uncomfortable, even for his lax standards; but the dread⁹ of letting a stranger loose in the studio made him prefer to put up with Mme. Lebel’s intermittent¹⁰ services.
 
So far she had borne up bravely. Her orphan¹¹ grandsons were all at the front (how that word had insinuated¹² itself into the language!) but she continued to have fairly frequent reassuring¹³ news of them. The Chasseur Alpin, slightly wounded in Alsace, was safe in hospital; and the others were well, and wrote cheerfully. Her son Jules, the cabinetmaker, was guarding 124a bridge at St. Cloud, and came in regularly to see her; but Campton noticed that it was about him that she seemed most anxious.
 
He was a silent industrious¹⁴ man, who had worked hard to support his orphaned¹⁵ nephews and his mother, and had married in middle age, only four or five years before the war, when the lads could shift for themselves, and his own situation was secure enough to permit the luxury of a wife and baby.
 
Mme. Jules had waited patiently for him, though she had other chances; and finally they had married and the baby had been born, and blossomed into one of those finished little Frenchwomen who, at four or five, seem already to be musing¹⁶ on the great central problems of love and thrift¹⁷. The parents used to bring the child to see Campton, and he had made a celebrated¹⁸ sketch¹⁹ of her, in her Sunday bonnet²⁰, with little earrings²¹ and a wise smile. And these two, mother and child, had disappeared on the second of August as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed them.
 
As Campton entered he glanced at the old woman’s den⁵, saw that it was empty, and said to himself: “She’s at St. Cloud again.” For he knew that she seized every chance of being with her eldest²².
 
He unlocked his door and felt his way into the dark studio. Mme. Lebel might at least have made up the fire! Campton lit the lamp, found some wood, and 125knelt down stiffly by the stove. Really, life was getting too uncomfortable....
 
He was trying to coax²³ a flame when the door opened and he heard Mme. Lebel.
 
“Really, you know——” he turned to rebuke²⁴ her; but the words died on his lips. She stood before him, taking no notice; then her shapeless black figure doubled up, and she sank down into his own armchair. Mme. Lebel, who, even when he offered her a seat, never did more than rest respectful knuckles²⁵ on its back!
 
“What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” he exclaimed.
 
She lifted her aged²⁶ face. “Monsieur, I came about your fire; but I am too unhappy. I have more than I can bear.” She fumbled²⁷ vainly for a handkerchief, and wiped away her tears with the back of her old laborious²⁸ hand.
 
“Jules has enlisted³⁰, Monsieur; enlisted in the infantry³¹. He has left for the front without telling me.”
 
“Good Lord. Enlisted? At his age—is he crazy?”
 
“No, Monsieur. But the little girl—he’s had news——”
 
She waited to steady her voice, and then fishing in another slit³² of her multiple skirts, pulled out a letter. “I got that at midday. I hurried to St. Cloud—but he left yesterday.”
 
The letter was grim reading. The poor father had accidentally run across an escaped prisoner who had 126regained the French lines near the village where Mme. Jules and the child were staying. The man, who knew the wife’s family, had been charged by them with a message to the effect that Mme. Jules, who was a proud woman, had got into trouble with the authorities, and been sent off to a German prison on the charge of spying. The poor little girl had cried and clung to her mother, and had been so savagely³³ pushed aside by the officer who made the arrest that she had fallen on the stone steps of the “Kommandantur” and fractured her skull³⁵. The fugitive³⁶ reported her as still alive, but unconscious, and dying.
 
Jules Lebel had received this news the previous day; and within twenty-four hours he was at the front. Guard a bridge at St. Cloud after that? All he asked was to kill and be killed. He knew the name and the regiment³⁷ of the officer who had denounced his wife. “If I live long enough I shall run the swine down,” he wrote. “If not, I’ll kill as many of his kind as God lets me.”
 
Mme. Lebel sat silent, her head bowed on her hands; and Campton stood and watched her. Presently she got up, passed the back of her hand across her eyes, and said: “The room is cold. I’ll fetch some coal.”
 
Campton protested. “No, no, Mme. Lebel. Don’t worry about me. Make yourself something warm to drink, and try to sleep——”
 
“Oh, Monsieur, thank God for the work! If it were 127not for that——” she said, in the same words as the physician.
 
She hobbled away, and presently he heard her bumping up again with the coal.
 
When his fire was started, and the curtains drawn³⁸, and she had left him, the painter sat down and looked about the studio. Bare and untidy as it was, he did not find the sight unpleasant: he was used to it, and being used to things seemed to him the first requisite³⁹ of comfort. But to-night his thoughts were elsewhere: he saw neither the tattered⁴⁰ tapestries⁴¹ with their huge heroes and kings, nor the blotched walls hung with pictures, nor the canvases stacked against the chair-legs, nor the long littered table at which he wrote and ate and mixed his colours. At one moment he was with Fortin-Lescluze, speeding through the night toward fresh scenes of death; at another, in the loge downstairs, where Mme. Lebel, her day’s work done, would no doubt sit down as usual by her smoky lamp and go on with her sewing. “Thank God for the work——” they had both said.
 
And here Campton sat with idle hands, and did nothing——
 
It was not exactly his fault. What was there for a portrait-painter to do? He was not a portrait-painter only, and on his brief trip to Chalons some of the scenes by the way—gaunt unshorn faces of territorials⁴² at railway bridges, soldiers grouped about a provision-lorry, 128a mud-splashed company returning to the rear, a long grey train of “seventy-fives” ploughing forward through the rain—at these sights the old graphic⁴³ instinct had stirred in him. But the approaches of the front were sternly forbidden to civilians⁴⁵, and especially to neutrals (Campton was beginning to wince⁴⁶ at the word); he himself, who had been taken to Chalons by a high official of the Army Medical Board, had been given only time enough for his interview with Fortin, and brought back to Paris the same night. If ever there came a time for art to interpret the war, as Raffet, for instance, had interpreted Napoleon’s campaigns, the day was not yet; the world in which men lived at present was one in which the word “art” had lost its meaning.
 
And what was Campton, what had he ever been, but an artist?... A father; yes, he had waked up to the practice of that other art, he was learning to be a father. And now, at a stroke, his only two reasons for living were gone: since the second of August he had had no portraits to paint, no son to guide and to companion.
 
Other people, he knew, had found jobs: most of his friends had been drawn into some form of war-work. Dastrey, after vain attempts to enlist²⁹, thwarted⁴⁷ by an untimely sciatica, had found a post near the front, on the staff of a Red Cross Ambulance. Adele Anthony was working eight or nine hours a day in a Depot⁴⁸ which 129distributed food and clothing to refugees from the invaded provinces; and Mrs. Brant’s name figured on the committees of most of the newly-organized war charities. Among Campton’s other friends many had accepted humbler tasks. Some devoted⁴⁹ their time to listing and packing hospital supplies, keeping accounts in ambulance offices, sorting out refugees at the railway-stations, and telling them where to go for food and help; still others spent their days, and sometimes their nights, at the bitter-cold suburban⁵⁰ sidings where the long train-loads of wounded stopped on the way to the hospitals of the interior. There was enough misery⁵¹ and confusion at the rear for every civilian⁴⁴ volunteer to find his task.
 
Among them all, Campton could not see his place. His lameness⁵² put him at a disadvantage, since taxicabs were few, and it was difficult for him to travel in the crowded métro. He had no head for figures, and would have thrown the best-kept accounts into confusion; he could not climb steep stairs to seek out refugees, nor should he have known what to say to them when he reached their attics⁵³. And so it would have been at the railway canteens; he choked with rage and commiseration<............