Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  “Do you know anything about the people George was dining with last night?” he enquired abruptly.

  Miss Anthony knew everything and everybody in the American circle in Paris; she was a clearing-house of Franco-American gossip, and it was likely enough that if George had special reasons for wishing to spend his last evening away from his family she would know why. But the chance of her knowing what had been kept from him made Campton’s question, as soon as it was put, seem indiscreet, and he added hastily: “Not that I want”

  She looked surprised. “No: he didn’t tell me. Some young man’s affair, I suppose…” She smirked absurdly, her lashless eyes blinking under the pushed-back veil.

  Campton’s mind had already strayed from the question. Nothing bored him more than Adele doing the “sad dog,” and he was vexed at having given her such a chance to be silly. What he wanted to know was whether George had spoken to his old friend about his future—about his own idea of his situation, and his intentions and wishes in view of the grim chance which people, with propitiatory vagueness, call “anything happening.” Had the boy left any word, any message with her for any one? But it was useless to speculate, for if he had, the old goose, true as steel, would never betray it by as much as a twitch of her lids. She could look, when it was a question of keeping a secret, like such an impenetrable idiot that one could not imagine any one’s having trusted a secret to her.

  Campton had no wish to surprise George’s secrets, if the boy had any. But their parting had been so hopelessly Anglo-Saxon, so curt and casual, that he would have liked to think his son had left, somewhere, a message for him, a word, a letter, in case … in case there was anything premonitory in the sobbing of that girl at the next table.

  But Adele’s pink nose confronted him, as guileless as a rabbit’s, and he went out with her unsatisfied. They parted at the door of the restaurant, and Campton went to the studio to see if there were any news of his maid-servant Mariette. He meant to return to sleep there that night, and even his simple housekeeping was likely to be troublesome if Mariette should not arrive.

  On the way it occurred to him that he had not yet seen the morning papers, and he stopped and bought a handful.

  Negotiations, hopes, fears, conjectures—but nothing new or definite, except the insolent fact of Germany’s aggression, and the almost-certainty of England’s intervention. When he reached the studio he found Mme. Lebel in her usual place, paler than usual, but with firm lips and bright eyes. Her three grandsons had left for their depots the day before: one was in the Chasseurs Alpins, and probably already on his way to Alsace, another in the infantry, the third in the heavy artillery; she did not know where the two latter were likely to be sent. Her eldest son, their father, was dead; the second, a man of fifty, and a cabinetmaker by trade, was in the territorials, and was not to report for another week. He hoped, before leaving, to see the return of his wife and little girl, who were in the Ardennes with the wife’s people. Mme. Lebel’s mind was made up and her philosophy ready for immediate application.

  “It’s terribly hard for the younger people; but it had to be. I come from Nancy, Monsieur: I remember the German occupation. I understand better than my daughter-in-law. .

  There was no news of Mariette, and small chance of having any for some days, much less of seeing her. No one could tell how long civilian travel would be interrupted. Mme. Lebel, moved by her lodger’s plight, promised to “find some one”; and Campton mounted to the studio.

  He had left it only two days before, on the day when he had vainly waited for Fortin and his dancer; and an abyss already divided him from that vanished time. Then his little world still hung like a straw above an eddy; now it was spinning about in the central vortex.

  The pictures stood about untidily, and he looked curiously at all those faces which belonged to the other life. Each bore the mark of its own immediate passions and interests; not one betrayed the least consciousness of coming disaster except the face of poor Madame de Dolmetsch, whose love had enlightened her. Campton began to think of the future from the painter’s point of view. What a modeller of faces a great war must be! What would the people who came through it look like, he wondered.

  His bell tinkled, and he turned to answer it. Dastrey, he supposed … he had caught a glimpse of his friend across the crowd at the Gare de l’Est, seeing off his nephew, but had purposely made no sign. He still wanted to be alone, and above all not to hear war-talk. Mme. Lebel, however, had no doubt revealed his presence in the studio, and he could not risk offending Dastrey.

  When he opened the door it was a surprise to see there, instead of Dastrey’s anxious face, the round rosy countenance of a well-dressed youth with a shock of fair hair above eyes of childish candour.

  “Oh—come in,” Campton said, surprised, but divining a compatriot in a difficulty.

  The youth obeyed, blushing his apologies.

  “I’m Benny Upsher, sir,” he said, in a tone modest yet confident, as if the name were an introduction.

  “Oh” Campton stammered, cursing his absentmindedness and his unfailing faculty for forgetting names.

  “You’re a friend of George’s, aren’t you?” he risked.

  “Yes—tremendous. We were at Harvard together—he was two years ahead of me.”

  “Ah—then you’re still there?”

  Mr. Upsher’s blush became a mask of crimson. “Well—I thought I was, till this thing happened.”

  “What thing?”

  The youth stared at the older man with a look of celestial wonder.

  “This war.—George has started already, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes. Two hours ago.”

  “So they said—I looked him up at the Crillon. I wanted most awfully to see him; if I had, of course I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “My dear young man, you’re not bothering me. But what can I do?”

  Mr. Upsher’s composure seemed to be returning as the necessary preliminaries were cleared away. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “Of course what I’d like best is to join his regiment.”

  “Join his regiment—you!” Campton exclaimed.

  “Oh, I know it’s difficult; I raced up from Biarritz quick as I could to catch him.” He seemed still to be panting with the effort. “I want to be in this,” he concluded.

  Campton contemplated him with helpless perplexity. “But I don’t understand—there’s no reason, in your case. With George it was obligatory—on account of his being born here. But I suppose you were born in America?”

  “Well, I guess so: in Utica. My mother was Madeline Mayhew. I think we’re a sort of cousins, sir, aren’t we?”

  “Of course—of course. Excuse my not recalling it—just at first. But, my dear boy, I still don’t see”

  Mr. Upsher’s powers of stating his case were plainly limited. He pushed back his rumpled hair, looked hard again at his cousin, and repeated doggedly: “I want to be in this.”

  “This war?”

  He nodded.

  Campton groaned. What did the boy mean, and why come to him with such tomfoolery? At that moment he felt even more unfitted than usual to deal with practical problems, and in spite of the forgotten cousinship it was no affair of his what Madeline Mayhew’s son wanted to be in.

  But there was the boy himself, stolid, immovable, impenetrable to hints, and with something in his wide blue eyes like George—and yet so childishly different.

  “Sit down—have a cigarette, won’t you?—You know, of course,” Campton began, “that what you propose is almost insuperably difficult?”

  “Getting into George’s regiment?”

  “Getting into the French army at all—for a foreigner, a neutral… I’m afraid there’s really nothing I can do.”

  Benny Upsher smiled indulgently. “I can fix that up all right; getting into the army, I mean. The only thing that might be hard would be getting into his regiment.”

  “Oh, as to that—out of the question, I should think.” Campton was con
scious of speaking curtly: the boy’s bland determination was beginning to get on his nerves.

  “Thank you no end,” said Benny Upsher, getting up. “Sorry to have butted in,” he added, holding out a large brown hand.

  Campton followed him to the door perplexedly. He knew that something ought to be done—but what? On the threshold he laid his hand impulsively on the youth’s shoulder. “Look here, my boy, we’re cousins, as you say, and if you’re Madeline Mayhew’s boy you’re an only son. Moreover you’re George’s friend—which matters still more to me. I can’t let you go like this. Just let me say a word to you before”

  A gleam of shrewdness flashed through Benny Upsher’s inarticulate blue eyes. “A word or two against, you mean? Why, it’s awfully kind, but not the least earthly use. I guess I’ve heard all the arguments. But all I see is that hulking bully trying to do Belgium in. England’s coming in, ain’t she? Well, then why ain’t we?”

  “England? Why—why, there’s no analogy”

  The young man groped for the right word. “I don’t know. Maybe not. Only in tight places we always do seem to stand together.”

  “You’re mad—this is not our war. Do you really want to go out and butcher people?”

  “Yes—this kind of people,” said Benny Upsher cheerfully. ‘You see, I’ve had all this talk from Uncle Harvey Mayhew a good many times on the way over. We came out on the same boat: he wanted me to be his private secretary at the Hague Congress. But I was pretty sure I’d have a job of my own to attend to.”

  Campton still contemplated him hopelessly. “Where is your uncle?” he wondered.

  Benny grinned. “On his way to the Hague, I suppose.”

  “He ought to be here to look after you—some one ought to!”

  “Then you don’t see your way to getting me into George’s regiment?” Benny simply replied.

  An hour later Campton still seemed to see him standing there, with obstinate soft eyes repeating the same senseless question. It cost him an effort to shake off the vision.

  He returned to the Crillon to collect his possessions. On his table was a telegram, and he seized it eagerly, wondering if by some mad chance George’s plans were changed, if he were being sent back, if Fortin had already arranged something…

  He tore open the message, and read: “Utica July thirty-first. No news from Benny please do all you can to facilitate his immediate return to America dreadfully anxious your cousin Madeline Upsher.”

  “Good Lord!” Campton groaned—”and I never even asked the boy’s address!”

  

  Book II.

  X.

  The war was three months old—three centuries. By virtue of some gift of adaptation which seemed forever to discredit human sensibility, people were already beginning to live into the monstrous idea of it, acquire its ways, speak its language, regard it as a thinkable, endurable, arrangeable fact; to eat it by day, and sleep on it—yes, and soundly—at night.

  The war went on; life went on; Paris went on. She had had her great hour of resistance, when, alone, exposed and defenceless, she had held back the enemy and broken his strength. She had had, afterward, her hour of triumph, the hour of the Marne; then her hour of passionate and prayerful hope, when it seemed to the watching nations that the enemy was not only held back but thrust back, and victory finally in reach. That hour had passed in its turn, giving way to the grey reality of the trenches. A new speech was growing up in this new world. There were trenches now, there was a “Front”—people were beginning to talk of their sons at the front.

  The first time John Campton heard the phrase it sent a shudder through him. Winter was coming on, and he was haunted by the vision of the youths out there, boys of George’s age, thousands and thousands of them, exposed by day in reeking wet ditches and sleeping at night under the rain and snow. People were talking calmly of victory in the spring—the spring that was still six long months away! And meanwhile, what cold and wet, what blood and agony, what shattered bodies out on that hideous front, what shattered homes in all the lands it guarded!

  Campton could bear to think of these things now. His son was not at the front—was safe, thank God, and likely to remain so!

  During the first awful weeks of silence and uncertainty, when every morning brought news of a fresh disaster, when no letters came from the army and no private mesages could reach it—during those weeks, while Campton, like other fathers, was without news of his son, the war had been to him simply a huge featureless mass crushing him earthward, blinding him, letting him neither think nor move nor breathe.

  But at last he had got permission to go to Châlons, whither Fortin, who chanced to have begun his career as a surgeon, had been hastily transferred. The physician, called from his incessant labours in a roughly-improvised operating-room, to which Campton was led between rows of stretchers laden with livid blood-splashed men, had said kindly, but with a shade of impatience, that he had not forgotten, had done what he could; that George’s health did not warrant his being discharged from the army, but that he was temporarily on a staff-job at the rear, and would probably be kept there if such and such influences were brought to bear. Then, calling for hot water and fresh towels, the surgeon vanished and Campton made his way back with lowered eyes between the stretchers.

  The “influences” in question were brought to bear—not without Anderson Brant’s assistance—and now that George was fairly certain to be kept at clerical work a good many miles from the danger-zone Campton felt less like an ant under a landslide, and was able for the first time to think of the war as he might have thought of any other war: objectively, intellectually, almost dispassionately, as of history in the making.

  It was not that he had any doubt as to the rights and wrongs of the case. The painfully preserved equilibrium of the neutrals made a pitiful show now that the monstrous facts of the first weeks were known: Germany’s diplomatic perfidy, her savagery in the field, her premeditated and systematized terrorizing of the civil populations. Nothing could efface what had been done in Belgium and Luxembourg, the burning of Louvain, the bombardment of Rheims. These successive outrages had roused in Campton the same incredulous wrath as in the rest of mankind; but being of a speculative mind—and fairly sure now that George would never lie in the mud and snow with the others—he had begun to consider the landslide in its universal relations, as well as in its effects on his private ant-heap.

  His son’s situation, however, was still his central thought. That this lad, who was meant to have been born three thousand miles away in his own safe warless country, and who was regarded by the government of that country as having been born there, as subject to her laws and entitled to her protection—that this lad, by the most idiotic of blunders, a blunder perpetrated before he was born, should have been dragged into a conflict in which he was totally unconcerned, should become temporarily and arbitrarily the subject of a foreign state, exposed to whatever catastrophes that state might draw upon itself, this fact dawned on him that his boy’s very life might hang on some tortuous secret negotiation between the cabinets of Europe.

  He still refused to admit that France had any claim on George, any right to his time, to his suffering or to his life. He had argued it out a hundred times with Adele Anthony. “You say Julia and I were to blame for not going home before the boy was born—and God knows I agree with you! But suppose we’d meant to go? Suppose we’d made every arrangement, taken every precaution, as my parents did in my case, got to Havre or Cherbourg, say, and been told the steamer had broken her screw—or been prevented ourselves, at the last moment, by illness or accident, or any sudden grab of the Hand of God? You’ll admit we shouldn’t have been to blame for that; yet the law would have recognized no difference. George would still have found himself a French soldier on the second of last August because, by the same kind of unlucky accident, he and I were born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. And I say that’s enough to prove it’s an iniquitous law, a travesty of justice. Nobody’s go
ing to convince me that, because a steamer may happen to break a phlange of her screw at the wrong time, or a poor woman be frightened by a thunderstorm, France has the right to force an American boy to go and rot in the trenches.”

  “In the trenches—is George in the trenches?” Adele Anthony asked, raising her pale eyebrows.

  “No,” Campton thundered, his fist crashing down among her tea things; “and all your word-juggling isn’t going to convince me that he ought to be there.” He paused and stared furiously about the little lady-like drawing-room into which Miss Anthony’s sharp angles were so incongruously squeezed. She made no answer, and he went on: “George looks at the thing exactly as I do.”

  “Has he told you so?” Miss Anthony enquired, rescuing his teacup and putting sugar into her own.

  “He has told me nothing to the contrary. You don’t seem to be aware that military correspondence is censored, and that a solider can’t always blurt out everything he thinks.”

  Miss Anthony followed his glance about the room, and her eyes paused with his on her own portrait, now in the place of honour over the mantelpiece, where it hung incongruously above a menagerie of china animals and a collection of trophies for the Marne.

  “I dropped in at the Luxembourg yesterday,” she said. “Do you know whom I saw there? Anderson Brant. He was looking at George’s portrait, and turned as red as a beet. You ought to do him a sketch of George some day—after this.”

  Campton’s face darkened. He knew it was partly through Brant’s influence that George had been detached from his regiment and given a staff job in the Argonne; but Miss Anthony’s reminder annoyed him. The Brants had acted through sheer selfish cowardice, the desire to safeguard something which belonged to them, something they valued as they valued their pictures and tapestries, though of course in a greater degree; whereas he, Campton, was sustained by a principle which he could openly avow, and was ready to discuss with any one who had the leisure to listen.