Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  But his excitement and Boylston’s exultation were short-lived. Before many days it became apparent that the proud nation which had flamed up overnight at the unproved outrage of the Maine was lying supine under the flagrant provocation of the Lusitania. The days which followed were, to many Americans, the bitterest of the war: to Campton they seemed the ironic justification of the phase of indifference 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 zeal. The bitter taste of the national humiliation was perpetually on his lips: he went about like a man dishonoured.

  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 recoiled; 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 rheumatism, had left the Ministry 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 pretext of being near her hospital), and Campton heard of the Talketts’ being with her, and others of their set. Mr. Mayhew appeared at the studio one day, in tennis flannels and a new straw hat, announcing that he “needed rest,” and rather sheepishly adding that Mrs. Brant had suggested his spending “a quiet fortnight” with her. “I’ve got to do it, if I’m to see this thing through,” Mr. Mayhew added in a stern voice, as if commanding himself not to waver.

  A few days later, glancing over the Herald, Campton read that Mme. de Dolmetsch, “the celebrated artiste,” was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Brant at Deauville, where she had gone to give recitations for the wounded in hospital. Campton smiled, and then thought with a tightening heart of Benny Upsher and Ladislas Isador, so incredibly unlike in their lives, so strangely one in their death. Finally, not long afterward, he read that the celebrated financier, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein (recently knighted by the British Government) had bestowed a gift of a hundred thousand francs upon Mrs. Brant’s hospital. It was rumoured, the paragraph ended, the Sir Cyril would soon receive the Legion of Honour for his magnificent liberalities to France.

  And still the flood of war rolled on. Success here, failure there, the menace of disaster elsewhere—Russia retreating to the San, Italy declaring war on Austria and preparing to cross the Isonzo, the British advance at Anzac, and from the near East news of the new landing at Suvla. Through all this alternating of tragedy and triumph ran the million and million individual threads of hope, fear, fortitude, resolve, with which the fortune of the war was obscurely but fatally interwoven. Campton remembered his sneer at Dastrey’s phrase: “One can at least contribute an attitude.” He had begun to feel the force of that, to understand the need of every human being’s “pulling his weight” in the struggle, had begun to scan every face in the street in the passionate effort to distinguish between the stones in the wall of resistance and the cracks through which discouragement might filter.

  The shabby office of the Palais Royal again became his only haven. His portrait of Mrs. Talkett had brought him many new orders; but he refused them all, and declined even to finish the pictures interrupted by the war. One of his abrupt revulsions of feeling had flung him back, heart and brain, into the horror he had tried to escape from. “If thou ascend up into heaven I am there; if thou make thy bed in hell, behold I am there,” the war said to him; and as the daily head-lines shrieked out the names of new battle-fields, from the Arctic shore to the Pacific, he groaned back like the Psalmist: “Whither shall I go from thee?”

  The people about him—Miss Anthony, Boylston, Mile. Davril, and all their band of tired resolute workers—plodded ahead, their eyes on their task, seeming to find in its fulfillment a partial escape from the intolerable oppression. The women especially, with their gift of living in the particular, appeared hardly aware of the appalling development of the catastrophe; and Campton felt himself almost as lonely among these people who thought of nothing but the war as among those who hardly thought of it at all. It was only when he and Boylston, after a hard morning’s work, went out to lunch together, that what he called the Lusitania look, suddenly darkening the younger man’s face, moved the painter with an anguish like his own.

  Boylston, breaking through his habitual shyness, had one day remonstrated with Campton for not going on with his painting: but the latter had merely rejoined: “We’ve each of us got to worry through this thing in our own way—” and the subject was not again raised between them.

  The intervals between George’s letters were growing longer. Campton, who noted in his pocket-diary the dates of all that he received, as well as those addressed to Mrs. Brant and Miss Anthony, had not had one to record since the middle of June. And in that there was no allusion to the Lusitania.

  “It’s queer,” he said to Boylston, one day toward the end of July; “I don’t know yet what George thinks about the Lusitania.”

  “Oh, yes, you do, sir!” Boylston returned, laughing; “but all the mails from the war-zone,” he added, “have been very much delayed lately. When there’s a big attack on anywhere they hold up everything along the line. And besides, no end of letters are lost.”

  “I suppose so,” said Campton, pocketing the diary, and trying for the millionth time to call up a vision of his boy, seated at a desk in some still unvisualized place, his rumpled fair head bent above columns of figures or files of correspondence, while day after day the roof above him shook with the roar of the attacks which held up his letters.

  

  Book III.

  XXIV.

  The gates of Paris were behind them, and they were rushing through an icy twilight between long lines of houses, factory chimneys and city-girt fields, when Campton at last roused himself and understood.

  It was he, John Campton, who sat in that car—that noiseless swiftly-sliding car, so cushioned and commodious, so ingeniously fitted for all the exigencies and emergencies of travel, that it might have been a section of the Nouveau Luxe on wheels; and the figure next to him, on the extreme other side of the deeply upholstered seat, was that of Anderson Brant. This, for the moment, was as far as Campton’s dazed perceptions carried him…

  The motor was among real fields and orchards, and the icy half-light which might just as well have been dusk was turning definitely to dawn, when at last, disentangling his mind from a tight coil of passport and permit problems, he thought: “But this is the road north of Paris—that must have been St. Denis.”

  Among all the multiplied strangenesses of the last strange hours it had hardly struck him before that, now he was finally on his way to George, it was not to the Argonne that he was going, but in the opposite direction. The discovery held his floating mind for a moment, but for a moment only, before it drifted away again, to be caught on some other projecting strangeness.

  Chief among these was Mr. Brant’s presence at his side, and the fact that the motor they were sitting in was Mr. Brant’s. But Campton felt that such enormities were not to be dealt with yet. He had neither slept nor eaten since the morning before, and whenever he tried to grasp the situation in its entirety his spirit fainted away again into outer darkness…

  His companion presently coughed, and said, in a voice even more than usually colourless and expressionless: “We are at Luzarches already.”

  It was the first time, Campton was sure, that Mr. Brant had spoken since they had got into the car together, hours earlier as it seemed to him, in the dark street before the studio in Montmartre; the first, at least, except to ask, as the chauffeur touched the self-starter: “Will you have the rug over you?”

  The two travellers did not share a rug: a separate one, soft as fur and light a
s down, lay neatly folded on the grey carpet before each seat; but Campton, though the early air was biting, had left his where it lay, and had not answered.

  Now he was beginning to feel that he could not decently remain silent any longer; and with an effort which seemed as mechanical and external as the movements of the chauffeur whose back he viewed through the wide single sheet of plate-glass, he brought out, like a far-off echo: “Luzarches …?”

  It was not that there lingered in him any of his old sense of antipathy toward Mr. Brant. In the new world into which he had been abruptly hurled, the previous morning, by the coming of that letter which looked so exactly like any other letter—in this new world Mr. Brant was nothing more than the possessor of the motor and of the “pull” that were to get him, Campton, in the shortest possible time, to the spot of earth where his son lay dying. Once assured of this, Campton had promptly and indifferently acquiesced in Miss Anthony’s hurried suggestion that it would be only decent to let Mr. Brant go to Doullens with him.

  But the exchange of speech with any one, whether Mr. Brant or another, was for the time being manifestly impossible. The effort, to Campton, to rise out of his grief, was like that of a dying person struggling back from regions too remote for his voice to reach the ears of the living. He shrank into his corner, and tried once more to fix his attention on the flying landscape.

  All that he saw in it, speeding ahead of him even faster than their own flight, was the ghostly vision of another motor, carrying a figure bowed like his, mute like his: the figure of Fortin-Lescluze, as he had seen it plunge away into the winter darkness after the physician’s son had been killed. Campton remembered asking himself then, as he had asked himself so often since: “How should I bear it if it happened to me?”

  He knew the answer to that now, as he knew everything else a man could know: so it had seemed to his astonished soul since the truth had flashed at him out of that fatal letter. Ever since then he had been turning about and about in a vast glare of initiation: of all the old crowded misty world which the letter had emptied at a stroke, nothing remained but a few memories of George’s boyhood, like a closet of toys in a house knocked down by an earthquake.

  The vision of Fortin-Lescluze’s motor vanished, and in its place Campton suddenly saw Boylston’s screwed-up eyes staring out at him under furrows of anguish. Campton remembered, the evening before, pushing the letter over to him across the office table, and stammering:

  “Read it—read it to me. I can’t” and Boylston’s sudden sobbing explosion: “But I knew, sir—I’ve known all along …” and then the endless pause before Campton gathered himself up to falter out (like a child deciphering the words in a primer): “You knew—knew that George was wounded?”

  “No, no, not that; but that he might be—oh, at any minute! Forgive me—oh, do forgive me! He wouldn’t let me tell you that he was at the front,” Boylston had faltered through his sobs.

  “Let you tell me?”

  “You and his mother: he refused a citation last March so that you shouldn’t find out that he’d exchanged into an infantry regiment. He was determined to from the first. He’s been fighting for months; he’s been magnificent; he got away from the Argonne last February; but you were none of you to know.”

  “But why—why—why?” Campton had flashed out; then his heart stood still, and he awaited the answer with lowered head.

  “Well, you see, he was afraid: afraid you might prevent… use your influence … you and Mrs. Brant…”

  Campton looked up again, challenging the other. “He imagined perhaps that we had—in the beginning?”

  “Oh, yes”—Boylston was perfectly calm about it—”he knew all about that. And he made us swear not to speak; Miss Anthony and me. Miss Anthony knew… If this thing happened,” Boylston ended in a stricken voice, “you were not to be unfair to her, he said.”

  Over and over again that short dialogue distilled itself syllable by syllable, pang by pang, into Campton’s cowering soul. He had had to learn all this, this overwhelming unbelievable truth about his son; and at the same instant to learn that that son was grievously wounded, perhaps dying (what else, in such circumstances, did the giving of the Legion of Honour ever mean?); and to deal with it all in the wild minutes of preparation for departure, of intercession with the authorities, sittings at the photographer’s, and a crisscross of confused telephone-calls from the Embassy, the Prefecture and the War Office.

  From the welter of images Miss Anthony’s face next detached itself: white and withered, yet with a look which triumphed over its own ruin, and over Campton’s wrath.

  “Ah—you knew too, did you? You were his other confidant? How you all kept it up—how you all lied to us!” Campton had burst out at her.

  She took it firmly. “I showed you his letters.”

  “Yes: the letters he wrote to you to be shown.”

  She received this in silence, and he followed it up. “It was you who drove him to the front—it was you who sent my son to his death!”

  Without flinching, she gazed back at him. “Oh, John—it was you!”

  “I—I? What do you mean? I never as much as lifted a finger”

  “No?” She gave him a wan smile. “Then it must have been the old man who invented the Mangle!” she cried, and cast herself on Campton’s breast. He held her there for a long moment, stroking her lank hair, and saying “Adele—Adele,” because in that rush of understanding he could not think of anything else to say. At length he stooped and laid on her lips the strangest kiss he had ever given or taken; and it was then that, drawing back, she exclaimed: “That’s for George, when you get to him. Remember!”

  The image of George’s mother rose last on the whirling ground of Campton’s thoughts: an uncertain image, blurred by distance, indistinct as some wraith of Mme. Olida’s evoking.

  Mrs. Brant was still at Biarritz; there had been no possibility of her getting back in time to share the journey to the front. Even Mr. Brant’s power in high places must have fallen short of such an attempt; and it was not made. Boylston, despatched in haste to bear the news of George’s wounding to the banker, had reported that the utmost Mr. Brant could do was to write at once to his wife, and arrange for her return to Paris, since telegrams to the frontier departments travelled more slowly than letters, and in nine cases out of ten were delayed indefinitely. Campton had asked no more at the time but in the last moment before leaving Paris he remembered having said to Adele Anthony: “You’ll be there when Julia comes?” and Miss Anthony had nodded back: “At the station.”

  The word, it appeared, roused the same memory in both of them; meeting her eyes, he saw there the Gare de l’Est in the summer morning, the noisily manoeuvring trains jammed with bright young heads, the flowers, the waving handkerchiefs, and everybody on the platform smiling fixedly till some particular carriage-window slid out of sight. The scene, at the time, had been a vast blur to Campton: would he ever again, he wondered, see anything as clearly as he saw it now, in all its unmerciful distinctness? He heard the sobs of the girl who had said such a blithe goodbye to the young Chasseur Alpin, he saw her going away, led by her elderly companion, and powdering her nose at the laiterie over the cup of coffee she could not swallow. And this was what her sobs had meant…

  “This place,” said Mr. Brant, with his usual preliminary cough, “must be—” He bent over a motor-map, trying to decipher the name; but after fumbling for his eye-glasses, and rubbing them with a beautifully monogrammed cambric handkerchief, he folded the map up again and slipped it into one of the many pockets which honeycombed the interior of the car. Campton recalled the deathlike neatness of the banker’s private office on the day when the one spot of disorder in it had been the torn telegram announcing Benny Upsher’s disappearance.

  The motor lowered its speed to make way for a long train of army lorries. Close upon them clattered a file of gun-wagons, with unshaven soldiers bestriding the gaunt horses. Torpedo-cars carrying officers slipped cleverly in
and out of the tangle, and motor-cycles, incessantly rushing by, peppered the air with their explosions.

  “This is the sort of thing he’s been living in—living in for months and months,” Campton mused.

  He himself had seen something of the same kind when he had gone to Châlons in the early days to appeal to Fortin-Lescluze; but at that time the dread significance of the machinery of war had passed almost unnoticed in his preoccupation about his boy. Now he realized that for a year that machinery had been the setting of his boy’s life; for months past such sights and sounds as these had formed the whole of George’s world; and Campton’s eyes took in every detail with an agonized avidity.

  “What’s that?” he exclaimed.

  A huge continuous roar, seeming to fall from the low clouds above them, silenced the puny rumble and clatter of the road. On and on it went, in a slow pulsating rhythm, like the boom of waves driven by a gale on some far-distant coast.

  “That? The guns” said Mr. Brant.

  “At the front?”

  “Oh, sometimes they seem much nearer. Depends on the wind.”

  Campton sat bewildered. Had he ever before heard that sinister roar? At Châlons? He would not be sure. But the sound had assuredly not been the same; now it overwhelmed him like the crash of the sea over a drowning head. He cowered back in his corner. Would it ever stop, he asked himself? Or was it always like this, day and night, in the hell of hells that they were bound for? Was that merciless thud forever in the ears of the dying?

  A sentinel stopped the motor and asked for their pass. He turned it about and about, holding it upside-down in his horny hands, and wrinkling his brows in the effort to decipher the inverted characters.