Mrs. Brant stopped, and Campton, sure now of what was coming, pushed his way through the neighbours about the door. Mme. Lebel’s eyes met his with the mute reproach of a tortured animal. “Jules,” she said, “last Wednesday … through the heart.”
Campton took her old withered hand. The women ceased sobbing and a hush fell upon the stifling little room. When Campton looked up again he saw Julia Brant, pale and bewildered, hurrying toward her motor, and the vault of the porte-cochere sent back the chauffeur’s answer to her startled question: “Poor old lady—yes, her only son’s been killed at the front.”
XVI.
Campton sat with his friend Dastrey in the latter’s pleasant little entresol full of Chinese lacquer and Venetian furniture.
Dastrey, in the last days of January, had been sent home from his ambulance with an attack of rheumatism; and when it became clear that he could no longer be of use in the mud and cold of the army zone he had reluctantly taken his place behind a desk at the Ministry of War. The friends had dined early, so that he might get back to his night-shift; and they sat over coffee and liqueurs, the mist of their cigars floating across lustrous cabinet-fronts and the worn gilding of slender consoles.
On the other side of the hearth young Boylston, sunk in an armchair, smoked and listened.
“It always comes back to the same thing,” Campton was saying nervously. “What right have useless old men like me, sitting here with my cigar by this good fire, to preach blood and butchery to boys like George and your nephew?”
Again and again, during the days since Mrs. Brant’s visit, he had turned over in his mind the same torturing question. How was he to answer that last taunt of hers?
Not long ago, Paul Dastrey would have seemed the last person to whom he could have submitted such a problem. Dastrey, in the black August days, starting for the front in such a frenzy of baffled blood-lust, had remained for Campton the type of man with whom it was impossible to discuss the war. But three months of hard service in Postes de Secours and along the awful battle-edge had sent him home with a mind no longer befogged by personal problems. He had done his utmost, and knew it; and the fact gave him the professional calm which keeps surgeons and nurses steady through all the horrors they are compelled to live among. Those few months had matured and mellowed him more than a lifetime of Paris.
He leaned back with half-closed lids, quietly considering his friend’s difficulty.
“I see. Your idea is that, being unable to do even the humble kind of job that I’ve been assigned to, you’ve no right not to try to keep your boy out of it if you can?”
“Well—by any honourable means.”
Dastrey laughed faintly, and Campton reddened. “The word’s not happy, I admit.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that: I was considering how the meaning had evaporated out of lots of our old words, as if the general smash-up had broken their stoppers. So many of them, you see,” said Dastrey smiling, “we’d taken good care not to uncork for centuries. Since I’ve been on the edge of what’s going on fifty miles from here a good many of my own words have lost their meaning, and I’m not prepared to say where honour lies in a case like yours.” He mused a moment, and then went on: “What would George’s view be?”
Campton did not immediately reply. Not so many weeks ago he would have welcomed the chance of explaining that George’s view, %thank God, had remained perfectly detached and objective, and that the cheerful acceptance of duties forcibly imposed on him had not in the least obscured his sense of the fundamental injustice of his being mixed up in the thing at all.
But how could he say this now? If George’s view were still what his father had been in the habit of saying it was, then he held that view alone: Campton himself no longer thought that any civilized man could afford to stand aside from such a conflict.
“As far as I know,” he said, “George hasn’t changed his mind.”
Boylston stirred in his armchair, knocked the ash from his cigar, and looked up at the ceiling.
“Whereas you” Dastrey suggested.
“Yes,” said Campton. “I feel differently. You speak of the difference of having been in contact with what’s going on out there. But how can anybody not be in contact, who has any imagination, any sense of right and wrong? Do these pictures and hangings ever shut it out from you—or those books over there, when you turn to them after your day’s work? Perhaps they do, because you’ve got a real job, a job you’ve been ordered to do, and can’t not do. But for a useless drifting devil like me—my God, the sights and the sounds of it are always with me!”
“There are a good many people who wouldn’t call you useless, Mr. Campton,” said Boylston.
Campton shook his head. “I wish there were any healing in the kind of thing I’m doing; perhaps there is to you, to whom it appears to come naturally to love your kind.” (Boylston laughed.) “Service is of no use without conviction: that’s one of the uncomfortable truths this stir-up has brought to the surface. I was meant to paint pictures in a world at peace, and I should have more respect for myself if I could go on unconcernedly doing it, instead of pining to be in all the places where I’m not wanted, and should be of no earthly use. That’s why” he paused, looked about him, and sought understanding in Dastrey’s friendly gaze: “That’s why I respect George’s opinion, which really consists in not having any, and simply doing without comment the work assigned to him. The whole thing is so far beyond human measure that one’s individual rage and revolt seem of no more use than a woman’s scream at an accident she isn’t in.”
Even while he spoke, Campton knew he was arguing only against himself. He did not in the least believe that any individual sentiment counted for nothing at such a time, and Dastrey really spoke for him in rejoining: “Every one can at least contribute an attitude: as you have, my dear fellow. Boylston’s here to confirm it.”
Boylston grunted his assent.
“An attitude—an attitude?” Campton retorted. “The word is revolting to me! Anything a man like me can do is too easy to be worth doing. And as for anything one can say: how dare one say anything, in the face of what is being done out there to keep this room and this fire, and this ragged end of life, safe for such survivals as you and me?” He crossed to the table to take another cigar. As he did so he laid an apologetic pressure on his host’s shoulder. “Men of our age are the chorus of the tragedy, Dastrey; we can’t help ourselves. As soon as I open my lips to blame or praise I see myself in white petticoats, with a long beard held on by an elastic, goading on the combatants in a cracked voice from a safe corner of the ramparts. On the whole I’d sooner be spinning among the women.”
“Well,” said Dastrey, getting up, “I’ve got to get back to my spinning at the Ministry; where, by the way, there are some very pretty young women at the distaff. It’s extraordinary how much better pretty girls type than plain ones; I see now why they get all the jobs.”
The three went out into the winter blackness. They were used by this time to the new Paris: to extinguished lamps, shuttered windows, deserted streets, the almost total cessation of wheeled traffic. All through the winter, life had seemed in suspense everywhere, as much on the battle-front as in the rear. Day after day, week after week, of vague non-committal news from west and east; everywhere the enemy baffled but still menacing, everywhere death, suffering, destruction, without any perceptible oscillation of the scales, any compensating hope of good to come out of the long slow endless waste. The benumbed and darkened Paris of those February days seemed the visible image of a benumbed and darkened world.
Down the empty asphalt sheeted with rain the rare street lights stretched interminable reflections. The three men crossed the bridge and stood watching the rush of the Seine. Below them gloomed the vague bulk of deserted bath-houses, unlit barges, river-steamers out of commission. The Seine too had ceased to live: only a single orange gleam, low on the water’s edge, undulated on the jetty waves like a streamer of seaweed.
The two Americans left Dastrey at his Ministry, and the painter strolled on to Boylston’s lodging before descending to the underground railway. He, whom his lameness had made so heavy and indolent, now limped about for hours at a time over wet pavements and under streaming skies: these midnight tramps had become a sort of expiatory need to him. “Out there—out there, if they had these wet stones under them they’d think it was the floor of heaven,” he used to muse, driving on obstinately through rain and darkness.
The thought of “Out there” besieged him day and night, the phrase was always in his ears. Wherever he went he was pursued by visions of that land of doom: visions of fathomless mud, rat-haunted trenches, freezing nights under the sleety sky, men dying in the barbed wire between the lines or crawling out to save a comrade and being shattered to death on the return. His collaboration with Boylston had brought Campton into close contact with these things. He knew by heart the history of scores and scores of young men of George’s age who were doggedly suffering and dying a few hours away from the Palais Royal office where their records were kept. Some of these histories were so heroically simple that the sense of pain was lost in beauty, as though one were looking at suffering transmuted into poetry. But others were abominable, unendurable, in their long-drawn useless horror: stories of cold and filth and hunger, of ineffectual effort, of hideous mutilation, of men perishing of thirst in a shell-hole, and half-dismembered bodies dragging themselves back to shelter only to die as they reached it. Worst of all were the perpetually recurring reports of military blunders, medical neglect, carelessness in high places: the torturing knowledge of the lives that might have been saved if this or that officer’s brain, this or that surgeon’s hand, had acted more promptly. An impression of waste, confusion, ignorance, obstinacy, prejudice, and the indifference of selfishness or of mortal fatigue, emanated from these narratives written home from the front, or faltered out by white lips on hospital pillows.
“The Friends of French Art,” especially since they had enlarged their range, had to do with young men accustomed to the freest exercise of thought and criticism. A nation in arms does not judge a war as simply as an army of professional soldiers. All these young intelligences were so many subtly-adjusted instruments for the testing of the machinery of which they formed a part; and not one accepted the results passively. Yet in one respect all were agreed: the “had to be” of the first day was still on every lip. The German menace must be met: chance willed that theirs should be the generation to meet it; on that point speculation was vain and discussion useless. The question that stirred them all was how the country they were defending was helping them to carry on the struggle. There the evidence was cruelly clear, the comment often scathingly explicit; and Campton, bending still lower over the abyss, caught a shuddering glimpse of what might be—must be—if political blunders, inertia, tolerance, perhaps even evil ambitions and connivance, should at last outweigh the effort of the front. There was no logical argument against such a possibility. All civilizations had their orbit; all societies rose and fell. Some day, no doubt, by the action of that law, everything that made the world livable to Campton and his kind would crumble in new ruins above the old. Yes—but woe to them by whom such things came; woe to the generation that bowed to such a law! The Powers of Darkness were always watching and seeking their hour; but the past was a record of their failures as well as of their triumphs. Campton, brushing up his history, remembered the great turning-points of progress, saw how the liberties of England had been born of the ruthless discipline of the Norman conquest, and how even out of the hideous welter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had come more freedom and a wiser order. The point was to remember that the efficacy of the sacrifice was always in proportion to the worth of the victims; and there at least his faith was sure.
He could not, he felt, leave his former wife’s appeal unnoticed; after a day or two he wrote to George, telling him of Mrs. Brant’s anxiety, and asking in vague terms if George himself thought any change in his situation probable. His letter ended abruptly: “I suppose it’s hardly time yet to ask for leave”
XVII.
Not long after his midnight tramp with Boylston and Dastrey the post brought Campton two letters. One was postmarked Paris, the other bore the military frank and was addressed in his son’s hand: he laid it aside while he glanced at the first. It contained an engraved card:
MRS. ANDERSON BRANT
At Home on February 20th at 4 o’clock
Mr. Harvey Mayhew will give an account of his captivity in Germany
Mme. de Dolmetsch will sing
For the benefit of the “Friends of French Art Committee”
Tickets 100 francs
Enclosed was the circular of the sub-committee in aid of Musicians at the Front, with which Campton was not directly associated. It bore the names of Mrs. Talkett, Mme. Beausite and a number of other French and American ladies.
Campton tossed the card away. He was not annoyed by the invitation: he knew that Miss Anthony and Mile. Davril were getting up a series of drawing-room entertainments for that branch of the charity, and that the card had been sent to him as a member of the Honorary Committee. But any reminder of the sort always gave a sharp twitch to the Brant nerve in him. He turned to George’s letter.
It was no longer than usual; but in other respects it was unlike his son’s previous communications. Campton read it over two or three times.
“Dear Dad, thanks for yours of the tenth, which must have come to me on skis, the snow here is so deep.” (There had, in fact, been a heavy snow-fall in the Argonne.) “Sorry mother is bothering about things again; as you’ve often reminded me, they always have a way of ‘being as they will be,’ and even war doesn’t seem to change it. Nothing to worry her in my case—but you can’t expect her to believe that, can you? Neither you nor I can help it I suppose.
“There’s one thing that might help, though; and that is, your letting her feel that you’re a little nearer to her. War makes a lot of things look differently, especially this sedentary kind of war: it’s rather like going over all the old odds-and-ends in one’s cupboards. And some of them do look so foolish.
“I wish you’d see her now and then—just naturally, as if it had happened. You know you’ve got one Inexhaustible Topic between you. The said I.T. is doing well, and has nothing new to communicate up to now except a change of address. Hereafter please write to my Base instead of directing here, as there’s some chance of a shift of H.Q. The precaution is probably just a new twist of the old red tape, signifying nothing; but Base will always reach me if we are shifted. Let mother know, and explain, please; otherwise she’ll think the unthinkable.
“Interrupted by big drive—quill-drive, of course!
“As ever “Georgius Scriblerius.
“P.S. Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy either.
“No. 2.—I had thought of leave; but perhaps you’re right about that.”
It was the first time George had written in that way of his mother. His smiling policy had always been to let things alone, and go on impartially dividing his devotion between his parents, since they refused to share even that common blessing. But war gave everything a new look; and he had evidently, as he put it, been turning over the old things in his cupboards. How was it possible, Campton wondered, that after such a turning-over he was still content to write “Nothing new to communicate,” and to make jokes about another big quill-drive? Glancing at the date of the letter, Campton saw that it had been written on the day after the first ineffectual infantry assault on Vauquois. And George was sitting a few miles off, safe in headquarters at Sainte-Menehould, with a stout roof over his head and a beautiful brown gloss on his boots, scribbling punning letters while his comrades fell back from that bloody summit…
Suddenly Campton’s eyes filled. No; George had not written that letter for the sake of the joke: the joke was meant to cover what went before it. Ah, how young the boy w
as to imagine that his father would not see! Yes, as he said, war made so many of the old things look foolish…
Campton set out for the Palais Royal. He felt happier than for a long time past: the tone of his boy’s letter seemed to correspond with his own secret change of spirit. He knew the futility of attempting to bring the Brants and himself together, but was glad that George had made the suggestion. He resolved to see Julia that afternoon.
At the Palais Royal he found the indefatigable Boylston busy with an exhibition of paintings sent home from the front, and Mile. Davril helping to catalogue them. Lamentable pensioners came and went, bringing fresh tales of death, fresh details of savagery; the air was dark with poverty and sorrow. In the background Mme. Beausite flitted about, tragic and ineffectual. Boylston had not been able to extract a penny from Beausite for his secretary and the latter’s left-handed family; but Mme. Beausite had discovered a newly-organized charity which lent money to “temporarily embarrassed” war-victims; and with an artless self-satisfaction she had contrived to obtain a small loan for the victim of her own thrift. “For what other purpose are such charities founded?” she said, gently disclaiming in advance the praise which Miss Anthony and Boylston had no thought of offering her. Whenever Campton came in she effaced herself behind a desk, where she bent her beautiful white head over a card-catalogue without any perceptible results.
The telephone rang. Boylston, after a moment, looked up from the receiver.
“Mr. Campton!”
The painter glanced apprehensively at the instrument, which still seemed to him charged with explosives.
“Take the message, do. The thing always snaps at me.”
There was a listening pause: then Boylston said: “It’s about Upsher”
Campton started up. “Killed?”
Edith Wharton - Novel 14 Page 14