Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  Campton listened with growing attention. Nothing hitherto had been less in the line of his interests than the large schemes of general amelioration which were coming to be classed under the transatlantic term of “Social Welfare.” If questioned on the subject a few months earlier he would probably have concealed his fundamental indifference under the profession of an extreme individualism, and the assertion of every man’s right to suffer and starve in his own way. Even since Rene Davril’s death had brought home to him the boundless havoc of the war, he had felt no more than the impulse to ease his own pain by putting his hand in his pocket when a particular case was too poignant to be ignored.

  Yet here were people who had already offered their dearest to France, and were now pleading to be allowed to give all the rest; and who had had the courage and wisdom to think out in advance the form in which their gift would do most good. Campton had the awe of the unpractical man for anyone who knows how to apply his ideas. He felt that there was no use in disputing Mile. Davril’s plan: he must either agree to it or repocket his cheque.

  “I’ll do as you want, of course; but I’m not much good about details. Hadn’t you better consult some one else?” he suggested.

  Oh, that was already done: she had outlined her project to Miss Anthony and Mr. Boylston, who approved. All she wanted was Campton’s consent; and this he gave the more cordially when he learned that, for the present at least, nothing more was expected of him. First steps in beneficence, he felt, were unspeakably terrifying; yet he was already aware that, resist as he might, he would never be able to keep his footing on the brink of the abyss.

  Into it, as the days went by, his gaze was oftener and oftener plunged. He had begun to feel that pity was his only remaining link with his kind, the one barrier between himself and the dreadful solitude which awaited him when he returned to his studio. What would there have been to think of there, alone among his unfinished pictures and his broken memories, if not the wants and woes of people more bereft than himself? His own future was not a thing to dwell on. George was safe: but what George and he were likely to make of each other after the ordeal was over was a question he preferred to put aside. He was more and more taking George and his safety for granted, as a solid standing-ground from which to reach out a hand to the thousands struggling in the depths. As long as the world’s fate was in the balance it was every man’s duty to throw into that balance his last ounce of brain and muscle. Campton wondered how he had ever thought that an accident of birth, a remoteness merely geographical, could justify, or even make possible, an attitude of moral aloofness. Harvey Mayhew’s reasons for wishing to annihilate Germany began to seem less grotesque than his own for standing aside.

  In the heat of his conversion he no longer grudged the hours given to Mr. Mayhew. He patiently led his truculent relative from one government office to another, everywhere laying stress on Mr. Mayhew’s sympathy with France and his desire to advocate her cause in the United States, and trying to curtail his enumeration of his grievances by a glance at the clock, and the reminder that they had another Minister to see. Mr. Mayhew was not very manageable. His adventure had grown with repetition, and he was increasingly disposed to feel that the retaliation he called down on Germany could best be justified by telling every one what he had suffered from her. Intensely aware of the value of time in Utica, he was less sensible of it in Paris, and seemed to think that, since he had left a flourishing business to preach the Holy War, other people ought to leave their affairs to give him a hearing. But his zeal and persistence were irresistible, and doors which Campton had seen barred against the most reasonable appeals flew open at the sound of Mr. Mayhew’s trumpet. His pink face and silvery hair gave him an apostolic air, and circles to which America had hitherto been a mere speck in space suddenly discovered that he represented that legendary character, the Typical American.

  The keen Boylston, prompt to note and utilize the fact, urged Campton to interest Mr. Mayhew in “The Friends of French Art,” and with considerable flourish the former Peace Delegate was produced at a committee meeting and given his head. But his interest flagged when he found that the “Friends” concerned themselves with Atrocities only in so far as any act of war is one, and that their immediate task was the humdrum one of feeding and clothing the families of the combatants and sending “comforts” to the trenches. He served up, with a somewhat dog-eared eloquence, the usual account of his own experiences, and pressed a modest gift upon the treasurer; but when he departed, after wringing everybody’s hands, and leaving the French members bedewed with emotion, Campton had the conviction that their quiet weekly meetings would not often be fluttered by his presence.

  Campton was spending an increasing amount of time in the Palais Royal restaurant, where he performed any drudgery for which no initiative was required. Once or twice, when Miss Anthony was submerged by a fresh influx of refugees, he lent her a hand too; and on most days he dropped in late at the office, waited for her to sift and dismiss the last applicants, and saw her home through the incessant rain. It interested him to note that the altruism she had so long wasted on pampered friends was developing into a wise and orderly beneficence. He had always thought of her as an eternal schoolgirl; now she had grown into a woman. Sometimes he fancied the change dated from the moment when their eyes had met across the station, the day they had seen George off. He wondered whether it might not be interesting to paint her new face, if ever painting became again thinkable.

  “Passion—I suppose the great thing is a capacity for passion,” he mused.

  In himself he imagined the capacity to be quite dead. He loved his son: yes—but he was beginning to see that he loved him for certain qualities he had read into him, and the perhaps after all. Well, %perhaps after all the sin for which he was now atoning in loneliness was that of having been too exclusively an artist, of having cherished George too egotistically and self-indulgently, too much as his own most beautiful creation. If he had loved him more humanly, more tenderly and recklessly, might he have not put into his son the tenderness and recklessness which were beginning to seem to him the qualities most supremely human?

  

  XV.

  A week or two later, coming home late from a long day’s work at the office, Campton saw Mme. Lebel awaiting him.

  He always stopped for a word now; fearing each time that there was bad news of Jules Lebel, but not wishing to seem to avoid her.

  Today, however, Mme. Lebel, though mysterious, was not anxious.

  “Monsieur will find the studio open. There’s a lady: she insisted on going up.”

  “A lady? Why did you let her in? What kind of a lady?”

  “A lady—well, a lady with such magnificent furs that one couldn’t keep her out in the cold,” Mme. Lebel answered with simplicity.

  Campton went up apprehensively. The idea of unknown persons in possession of his studio always made him nervous. Whoever they were, whatever errands they came on, they always—especially women—disturbed the tranquil course of things, faced him with unexpected problems, unsettled him in one way or another. Bouncing in on people suddenly was like dynamiting fish: it left him with his mind full of fragments of dismembered thoughts.

  As he entered he perceived from the temperate atmosphere that Mme. Lebel had not only opened the studio but made up the fire. The lady’s furs must indeed be magnificent.

  She sat at the farther end of the room, in a high-backed chair near the stove, and when she rose he recognized his former wife. The long sable cloak, which had slipped back over the chair, justified Mme. Lebel’s description, but the dress beneath it appeared to Campton simpler than Mrs. Brant’s habitual raiment. The lamplight, striking up into her powdered face, puffed out her underlids and made harsh hollows in her cheeks. She looked frightened, ill and yet determined.

  “John” she began, laying her hand on his sleeve.

  It was the first time she had ever set foot in his shabby quarters, and in his astonishment he could only
stammer out: “Julia”

  But as he looked at her he saw that her face was wet with tears. “Not—bad news?” he broke out.

  She shook her head and, drawing a handkerchief from a diamond-monogrammed bag, wiped away the tears and the powder. Then she pressed the handkerchief to her lips, gazing at him with eyes as helpless as a child’s.

  “Sit down,” said Campton.

  As they faced each other across the long table, with papers and paint-rags and writing materials pushed aside to make room for the threadbare napkin on which his plate and glass, and bottle of vin ordinaire, were set out, he wondered if the scene woke in her any memory of their first days of gaiety and poverty, or if she merely pitied him for still living in such squalor. And suddenly it occurred to him that when the war was over, and George came back, it would be pleasant to hunt out a little apartment in an old house in the Faubourg St. Germain, put some good furniture in it, and oppose the discreeter charm of such an interior to the heavy splendours of the Avenue Marigny. How could he expect to hold a luxury-loving youth if he had only this dingy studio to receive him in?

  Mrs. Brant began to speak.

  “I came here to see you because I didn’t wish any one to know; not Adele, nor even Anderson.” Leaning toward him she went on in short breathless sentences: “I’ve just left Madge Talkett: you know her, I think? She’s at Mme. de Dolmetsch’s hospital. Something dreadful has happened … too dreadful. It seems that Mme. de Dolmetsch was very much in love with Ladislas Isador; a writer, wasn’t he? I don’t know his books, but Madge tells me they’re wonderful … and of course men like that ought not to be sent to the front…”

  “Men like what?”

  “Geniuses,” said Mrs. Brant. “He was dreadfully delicate besides, and was doing admirable work on some military commission in Paris; I believe he knew any number of languages. And poor Mme. de Dolmetsch—you know I’ve never approved of her; but things are so changed nowadays, and at any rate she was madly attached to him, and had done everything to keep him in Paris: medical certificates, people at Headquarters working for her, and all the rest. But it seems there are no end of officers always intriguing to get staff-jobs: strong able-bodied young men who ought to be in the trenches, and are fit for nothing else, but who are jealous of the others. And last week, in spite of all she could do, poor Isador was ordered to the front.”

  Campton made an impatient movement. It was even more distasteful to him to be appealed to by Mrs. Brant in Isador’s name than by Mme. de Dolmetsch in George’s. His gorge rose at the thought that people should associate in their minds cases as different as those of his son and Mme. de Dolmetsch’s lover.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But if you’ve come to ask me to do something more about George—take any new steps—it’s no use. I can’t do the sort of thing to keep my son safe that Mme. de Dolmetsch would do for her lover.”

  Mrs. Brant stared. “Safe? He was killed the day after he got to the front.”

  “Good Lord—Isador?”

  Ladislas Isador killed at the front! The words remained unmeaning; by no effort could Campton relate them to the fat middle-aged philanderer with his Jewish eyes, his Slav eloquence, his Levantine gift for getting on, and for getting out from under. Campton tried to picture the clever contriving devil drawn in his turn into that merciless red eddy, and gulped down the Monster’s throat with the rest. What a mad world it was, in which the same horrible and magnificent doom awaited the coward and the hero!

  “Poor Mme. de Dolmetsch!” he muttered, remembering with a sense of remorse her desperate appeal and his curt rebuff. Once again the poor creature’s love had enlightened her, and she had foreseen what no one else in the world would have believed: that her lover was to die like a hero.

  “Isador was nearly forty, and had a weak heart; and she’d left nothing, literally nothing, undone to save him.” Campton read in his wife’s eyes what was coming. “It’s impossible now that George should not be taken,” Mrs. Brant went on.

  The same thought had tightened Campton’s own heart-strings; but he had hoped she would not say it.

  “It may be George’s turn any day,” she insisted.

  They sat and looked at each other without speaking; then she began again imploringly: “I tell you there’s not a moment to be lost!”

  Campton picked up a palette-knife and began absently to rub it with an oily rag. Mrs. Brant’s anguished voice still sounded on. “Unless something is done immediately… It appears there’s a regular hunt for embusques, as they’re called. As if it was everybody’s business to be killed! How’s the staff-work to be carried on if they’re all taken? But it’s certain that if we don’t act at once … act energetically..

  He fixed his eyes on hers. “Why do you come to me?” he asked.

  Her lids opened wide. “But he’s our child.”

  “Your husband knows more people—he has ways, you’ve often told me”

  She reddened faintly and seemed about to speak; but the reply died on her lips.

  “Why did you say,” Campton pursued, “that you had come here because you wanted to see me without Brant’s knowing it?”

  She lowered her eyes and fixed them on the knife he was still automatically rubbing.

  “Because Anderson thinks … Anderson won’t … He says he’s done all he can.”

  “Ah” cried Campton, drawing a deep breath. He threw back his shoulders, as if to shake off a weight. “I—feel exactly as Brant does,” he declared.

  “You—you feel as he does? You, George’s father? But a father has never done all he can for his son! There’s always something more that he can do!”

  The words, breaking from her in a cry, seemed suddenly to change her from an ageing doll into a living and agonized woman. Campton had never before felt as near to her, as moved to the depths by her. For the length of a heart-beat he saw her again with a red-haired baby in her arms, the light of morning on her face.

  “My dear—I’m sorry.” He laid his hand on hers.

  “Sorry—sorry? I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to do something—I want you to save him!”

  He faced her with bent head, gazing absently at their interwoven fingers: each hand had forgotten to release the other.

  “I can’t do anything more,” he repeated.

  She started up with a despairing exclamation. “What’s happened to you? Who has influenced you? What has changed you?”

  How could he answer her? He hardly knew himself: had hardly been conscious of the change till she suddenly flung it in his face. If blind animal passion be the profoundest as well as the fiercest form of attachment, his love for his boy was at that moment as nothing to hers. Yet his feeling for George, in spite of all the phrases he dressed it in, had formerly in its essence been no other. That his boy should survive—survive at any price—that had been all he cared for or sought to achieve. It had been convenient to justify himself by arguing that George was not bound to fight for France; but Campton now knew that he would have made the same effort to protect his son if the country engaged had been his own.

  In the careless pre-war world, as George himself had once said, it had seemed unbelievable that people should ever again go off and die in a ditch to oblige anybody. Even now, the automatic obedience of the millions of the untaught and the unthinking, though it had its deep pathetic significance, did not move Campton like the clear-eyed sacrifice of the few who knew why they were dying. Jean Fortin, Rene Davril, and such lads as young Louis Dastrey, with his reasoned horror of butchery and waste in general, and his instant grasp of the necessity of this particular sacrifice: it was they who had first shed light on the dark problem.

  Campton had never before, at least consciously, thought of himself and the few beings he cared for as part of a greater whole, component elements of the immense amazing spectacle. But the last four months had shown him man as a defenceless animal suddenly torn from his shell, stripped of all the interwoven tendrils of association, habit, backgrou
nd, daily ways and words, daily sights and sounds, and flung out of the human habitable world into naked ether, where nothing breathes or lives. That was what war did; that was why those who best understood it in all its farthest-reaching abomination willingly gave their lives to put an end to it.

  He heard Mrs. Brant crying.

  “Julia,” he said, “Julia, I wish you’d try to see …”

  She dashed away her tears. “See what? All I see is you, sitting here safe and saying you can do nothing to save him! But to have the right to say that you ought to be in the trenches yourself! What do you suppose those young men out there think of their fathers, safe at home, who are too high-minded and conscientious to protect them?”

  He looked at her compassionately. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the bitterest part of it. But for that, there would hardly be anything in the worst war for us old people to lie awake about.”

  Mrs. Brant had stood up and was feverishly pulling on her gloves: he saw that she no longer heard him. He helped her to draw her furs about her, and stood waiting while she straightened her veil and tapped the waves of hair into place, her eyes blindly seeking for a mirror. There was nothing more that either could say.

  He lifted the lamp, and went out of the door ahead of her.

  “You needn’t come down,” she said in a sob; but leaning over the rail into the darkness he answered: “I’ll give you a light: the concierges has forgotten the lamp on the stairs.”

  He went ahead of her down the long greasy flights, and as they reached the ground floor he heard a noise of feet coming and going, and frightened voices exclaiming. In the doorway of the porter’s lodge Mrs. Brant’s splendid chauffeur stood looking on compassionately at a group of women gathered about Mme. Lebel.

  The old woman sat in her den, her arms stretched across the table, her sewing fallen at her feet. On the table lay an open letter. The grocer’s wife from the corner stood by, sobbing.