He was surprised to find the Rue de Rivoli packed with people; but his only thought was the instinctive one of turning away to avoid them, and he began to retrace his steps in the direction of the Louvre. Then at a corner he paused again and looked back at the Place de la Concorde. It was not curiosity that drew him, heaven knew—he would never again be curious about anything—but he suddenly remembered the day three months earlier when, leaning from George’s window in the hospital, he had said to himself “By the time our first regiments arrive he’ll be up and looking at them from here, or sitting with me over there on the terrace”; and that decided him to turn back. It was as if he had felt the pressure of George’s hand on his arm.
Though it was still so early he had some difficulty in pushing his way through the throng. No seats were left on the terrace, but he managed to squeeze into a corner near one of the great vases of the balustrade; and leaning there, with the happy hubbub about him, he watched and waited.
Such a summer morning it was—and such a strange grave beauty had fallen on the place! He seemed to understand for the first time—he who had served Beauty all his days—how profoundly, at certain hours, it may become the symbol of things hoped for and things died for. All those stately spaces and raying distances, witnesses of so many memorable scenes, might have been called together just as the setting for this one event—the sight of a few brown battalions passing over them like a feeble trail of insects.
Campton, with a vague awakening of interest, glanced about him, studying the faces of the crowd. Old and young, infirm and healthy, civilians and soldiers—ah, the soldiers!—all were exultant, confident, alive. Alive! The word meant something new to him now—something so strange and unnatural that his mind still hung and brooded over it. For now that George was dead, by what mere blind propulsion did all these thousands of human beings keep on mechanically living?
He became aware that a boy, leaning over intervening shoulders, was trying to push a folded paper into his hand. On it was pencilled, in Mr. Brant’s writing: “There will be a long time to wait. Will you take the seat I have kept next to mine?” Campton glanced down the terrace, saw where the little man sat at its farther end, and shook his head. Then some contradictory impulse made him decide to get up, laboriously work his halting frame through the crowd, and insert himself into the place next to Mr. Brant. The two men nodded without shaking hands; after that they sat silent, their eyes on the empty square. Campton noticed that Mr. Brant wore his usual gray clothes, but with a mourning band on the left sleeve. The sight of that little band irritated Campton....