Campton, finishing a late breakfast in careless studio-garb, saw his visitor peer cautiously about, as though fearing undressed models behind the screens or empty beer-bottles under the tables. It was the first time that Mr. Brant had entered the studio since his attempt to buy George’s portrait, and Campton guessed at once that he had come again about George.

 

He looked at the painter shyly, as if oppressed by the indiscretion of intruding¹ at that hour.

 

“It was my—Mrs. Brant who insisted—when she got this letter,” he brought out between precautionary coughs.

 

Campton looked at him tolerantly: a barrier seemed to have fallen between them since their brief exchange of words about Benny Upsher. The letter, as Campton had expected, was a line from George to his mother, written two days after Mr. Brant’s visit to Sainte Menehould. It expressed, in George’s usual staccato style, his regret at having been away. “Hard luck, when one is riveted² to the same square yard of earth for weeks on end, to have just happened to be somewhere else the day Uncle Andy broke through.” It was always the same tone of fluent banter³, in which Campton fancied he detected a lurking⁴ stridency, like the scrape 249of an overworked gramophone containing only comic disks.

 

“Ah, well—his mother must be satisfied,” Campton said as he gave the letter back.

 

“Oh, completely. So much so that I’ve induced her to go off for a while to Biarritz. The doctor finds her overdone⁵; she’d got it into her head that George had been sent to the front; I couldn’t convince her to the contrary.”

 

Campton looked at him. “You yourself never believed it?”

 

Mr. Brant, who had half risen, as though feeling that his errand was done, slid back into his seat and clasped his small hands on his agate-headed stick.

 

“Oh, never.”

分享到：