Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  He had explained all this so often to Miss Anthony that the words rose again to his lips without an effort. “If it had been a national issue I should have wanted him to be among the first: such as our having to fight Mexico, for instance”

  “Yes; or the moon. For my part, I understand Julia and Anderson better. They don’t care a fig for national issues; they’re just animals defending their cub.”

  “Their—thank you!” Campton exclaimed.

  “Well, poor Anderson really was a dry-nurse to the boy. Who else was there to look after him? You were painting Spanish beauties at the time.” She frowned. “Life’s a puzzle. I see perfectly that if you’d let everything else go to keep George you’d never have become the great John Campton: the real John Campton you were meant to be. And it wouldn’t have been half as satisfactory for you—or for George either. Only, in the meanwhile, somebody had to blow the child’s nose, and pay his dentist and doctor; and you ought to be grateful to Anderson for doing it. Aren’t there bees or ants, or something, that are kept for such purposes?”

  Campton’s lips were opened to reply when her face changed, and he saw that he had ceased to exist for her. He knew the reason. That look came over everybody’s face nowadays at the hour when the evening paper came. The old maid-servant brought it in, and lingered to hear the communique. At that hour, everywhere over the globe, business and labour and pleasure (if it still existed) were suspended for a moment while the hearts of all men gathered themselves up in a question and prayer.

  Miss Anthony sought for her lorgnon and failed to find it. With a shaking hand she passed the newspaper over to Campton.

  “Violent enemy attacks in the region of Dixmude, Ypres, Armentières, Arras, in the Argonne, and on the advanced slopes of the Grand Couronne de Nancy, have been successfully repulsed. We have taken back the village of Soupir, near Vailly (Aisne); we have taken Maucourt and Mogeville, to the northeast of Verdun. Progress has been made in the region of Vermelles (Pas-de-Calais), south of Aix Noulette. Enemy attacks in the Hauts-de-Meuse and southeast of Saint-Mihiel have also been repulsed.

  “In Poland the Austrian retreat is becoming general. The Russians are still advancing in the direction of Kielce-Sandomir and have progressed beyond the San in Galicia. Mlawa has been reoccupied, and the whole railway system of Poland is now controlled by the Russian forces.”

  A good day—oh, decidedly a good day. At this rate, what became of the gloomy forecasts of the people who talked of a winter in the trenches, to be followed by a spring campaign? True, the Serbian army was still retreating before superior Austrian forces—but there too the scales would soon be turned if the Russians continued to progress. That day there was hope everywhere: the old maid-servant went away smiling, and Miss Anthony poured out another cup of tea.

  Campton had not lifted his eyes from the paper. Suddenly they lit on a short paragraph: “Fallen on the Field of Honour.” One had got used to that with the rest; used even to the pang of reading names one knew, evoking familiar features, young faces blotted out in blood, young limbs convulsed in the fires of that hell called “the Front.” But this time Campton turned pale and the paper fell to his knee.

  “Fortin-Lescluze; Jean-Jacques-Marie, lieutenant of Chasseurs a Pied, gloriously fallen for France…” There followed a ringing citation.

  Fortin’s son, his only son, was dead.

  Campton saw before him the honest bourgeois dining-room, so strangely out of keeping with the rest of the establishment; he saw the late August sun slanting in on the group about the table, on the ambitious and unscrupulous great man, the two quiet women hidden under his illustrious roof, and the youth who had held together these three dissimilar people, making an invisible home in the heart of all that publicity. Campton remembered his brief exchange of words with Fortin on the threshold, and the father’s uncontrollable outburst: “For his mother and myself it’s not a trifle—having our only son in the war.”

  Campton shut his eyes and leaned back, sick with the memory. This man had had a share in saving George; but his own son he could not save.

  “What’s the matter?” Miss Anthony asked, her hand on his arm.

  Campton could not bring the name to his lips. “Nothing—nothing. Only this room’s rather hot—and I must be off anyhow.” He got up, escaping from her solicitude, and made his way out. He must go at once to Fortin’s for news. The physician was still at Châlons; but there would surely be some one at the house, and Campton could at least leave a message and ask where to write.

  Dusk had fallen. His eyes usually feasted on the beauty of the new Paris, the secret mysterious Paris of veiled lights and deserted streets; but to-night he was blind to it. He could see nothing but Fortin’s face, hear nothing but his voice when he said: “Our only son in the war.”

  He groped along the pitch-black street for the remembered outline of the house (since no house-numbers were visible), and rang several times without result. He was just turning away when a big mud-splashed motor drove up. He noticed a soldier at the steering-wheel, then three people got out stiffly: two women smothered in crape and a haggard man in a dirty uniform. Campton stopped, and Fortin-Lescluze recognized him by the light of the motor-lamp. The four stood and looked at each other. The old mother, under her crape, appeared no bigger than a child.

  “Ah—you know?” the doctor said. Campton nodded.

  The father spoke in a firm voice. “It happened three days ago—at Suippes. You’ve seen his citation? They brought him in to me at Châlons without a warning—and too late. I took off both legs, but gangrene had set in. Ah—if I could have got hold of one of our big surgeons… Yes, we’re just back from the funeral… My mother and my wife … they had that comfort. .

  The two women stood beside him like shrouded statues. Suddenly Mme. Fortin’s deep voice came through the crape: “You saw him, Monsieur, that last day … the day you came about your own son, I think?”

  “I… yes …” Campton stammered in anguish.

  The physician intervened. “And, now, ma bonne mère, you’re not to be kept standing. You’re to go straight in and take your tisane and go to bed.” He kissed his mother and pushed her into his wife’s arms. “Good-bye, my dear. Take care of her.”

  The women vanished under the porte-cochere, and Fortin turned to the painter.

  “Thank you for coming. I can’t ask you in—I must go back immediately.”

  “Back?”

  “To my work. Thank God. If it were not for that”

  He jumped into the motor, called out “En route,” and was absorbed into the night.

  

  XI.

  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 obstinately refused. What business had he to be living in expensive hotels when, for the Lord knew how long, his means of earning a livelihood 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 stifling 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 would 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 entrusting his bed-making and dusting to old Mme. Lebel. In that way he could live for a long time without appreciably reducing his savings.

  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 dread of letting a stranger loose in the studio made him prefer to put up with Mme. Lebel’s intermittent services.

  So far she had borne up bravely. Her orphan grandsons were all at the front (how that word had insinuated itself into the language!) but she continued to have fairly frequent reassuring 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 a 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 industrious man, who had worked hard to support his orphaned 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 musing on the great central problems of love and thrift. The parents used to bring the child to see Campton, and he had made a celebrated sketch of her, in her Sunday bonnet, with little earrings 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 den, 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 eldest.

  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 knelt down stiffly by the stove. Really, life was getting too uncomfortable…

  He was trying to coax a flame when the door opened and he heard Mme. Lebel.

  “Really, you know” he turned to rebuke 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 knuckles on its back!

  “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” he exclaimed.

  She lifted her aged face. “Monsieur, I came about your fire; but I am too unhappy. I have more than I can bear.” She fumbled vainly for a handkerchief, and wiped away her tears with the back of her old laborious hand.

  “Jules has enlisted, Monsieur; enlisted in the infantry. 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 slit 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 regained 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 savagely pushed aside by the officer who made the arrest that she had fallen on the stone steps of the “Kommandantur” and fractured her skull. The fugitive 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 regiment 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 not 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 drawn, 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 requisite of comfort. But to-night his thoughts were elsewhere: he saw neither the tattered tapestries 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 sid 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 Châlons some of the scenes by the way—gaunt unshorn faces of territorials at railway bridges, soldiers grouped about a provision-lorry, a mud-splashed company returning to the rear, a long grey train of “seventy-fives” ploughing forward through the rain—at these sights the old graphic instinct had stirred in him. But the approaches of the front were sternly forbidden to civilians, and especially to neutrals (Campton was beginning to wince at the word); he himself, who had been taken to Châlons 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 enlist, thwarted 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 Depot which distributed 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 devoted 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 suburban sidings where the long train-loads of wounded stopped on the way to the hospitals of th
e interior. There was enough misery and confusion at the rear for every civilian volunteer to find his task.

  Among them all, Campton could not see his place. His lameness 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 attics. And so it would have been at the railway canteens; he choked with rage and commiseration at all the suffering about him, but found no word to cheer the sufferers.

  Secretly, too, he feared the demands that would be made on him if he once let himself be drawn into the network of war charities. Tiresome women would come and beg for money, or for pictures for bazaars: they were already getting up bazaars.

  Money he could not spare, since it was his duty to save it for George; and as for pictures—why, there were a few sketches he might give, but here again he was checked by his fear of establishing a precedent. He had seen in the papers that the English painters were already giving blank canvases to be sold by auction to millionaires in quest of a portrait. But that form of philanthropy would lead to his having to paint all the unpaintable people who had been trying to bribe a picture out of him since his sudden celebrity. No artist had a right to cheapen his art in that way: it could only result in his turning out work that would injure his reputation and reduce his sales after the war.

  So far, Campton had not been troubled by many appeals for help; but that was probably because he had kept out of sight, and thrown into the fire the letters of the few ladies who had begged a sketch for their sales, or his name for their committees.