Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  “Not sure. It’s Mr. Brant. The news was wired to the bank; they want you to break it to Mr. Mayhew.”

  “Oh, Lord,” the painter groaned, the boy’s face suddenly rising before his blurred eyes. Miss Anthony was not at the office that morning, or he would have turned to her; at least she might have gone with him on his quest. He could not ask Boylston to leave the office, and he felt that curious incapacity to deal with the raw fact of sorrow which had often given an elfin unreality to the most poignant moments of his life. It was as though experience had to enter into the very substance of his soul before he could even feel it.

  “Other people,” he thought, “would know what to say, and I shan’t. ..”

  Some one, meanwhile, had fetched a cab, and he drove to the Nouveau Luxe, though with little hope of finding Mr. Mayhew. But Mr. Mayhew had grown two secretaries, and turned the shrimp-pink drawing-room into an office. One of the secretaries was there, hammering at a typewriter. She was a competent young woman, who instantly extracted from her pocket-diary the fact that her chief was at Mrs. Anderson Brant’s, rehearsing.

  “Rehearsing?”

  “Why, yes; he’s to speak at Mrs. Brant’s next week on Atrocities,” she said, surprised at Campton’s ignorance.

  She suggested telephoning; but in the shrunken households of the rich, where but one or two servants remained, telephoning had become as difficult as in the under-staffed hotels; and after one or two vain attempts Campton decided to go to the Avenue Marigny. He felt that to get hold of Mayhew as soon as possible might still in some vague way help poor Benny—since it was not yet sure that he was dead. “Or else it’s just the need to rush about,” he thought, conscious that the only way he had yet found of dealing with calamity was a kind of ant-like agitation.

  On the way the round pink face of Benny Upsher continued to float before him in its very substance, with the tangibility that only a painter’s visions wear. “I want to be in this thing,” he heard the boy repeating, as if impelled by some blind instinct flowing down through, centuries and centuries of persistent childish minds.

  “If he or his forebears had ever thought things out he probably would have been alive and safe today,” Campton mused, “like George… The average person is always just obeying impulses stored up thousands of years ago, and never re-examined since.” But this consideration, though drawn from George’s own philosophy, did not greatly comfort his father.

  At the Brants’ a bewildered concierges admitted him and rang a bell which no one answered. The vestibule and the stairs were piled with bales of sheeting, bulging jute-bags, stacked-up hospital supplies. A boy in scout’s uniform swung inadequate legs from the lofty porter’s arm-chair beside the table with its monumental bronze inkstand. Finally, from above, a maid called to Campton to ascend.

  In the drawing-room pictures and tapestries, bronzes and pates tendres, had vanished, and a plain moquette replaced the priceless Savonnerie across whose pompous garlands Campton had walked on the day of his last visit.

  The maid led him to the ball-room. Through double doors of glass Mr. Mayhew’s oratorical accents, accompanied by faint chords on the piano, reached Campton’s ears: he paused and looked. At the far end of the great gilded room, on a platform backed by velvet draperies, stood Mr. Mayhew, a perfect pearl in his tie and a perfect crease in his trousers. Beside him was a stage-property tripod surmounted by a classical perfume-burner; and on it Mme. de Dolmetsch, swathed in black, leaned in an attitude of affliction.

  Beneath the platform a bushy-headed pianist struck an occasional chord from Chopin’s Dead March; and near the door three or four Red Cross nurses perched on bales of blankets and listened. Under one of their coifs Campton recognized Mrs. Talkett. She saw him and made a sign to the lady nearest her; and the latter, turning, revealed the astonished eyes of Julia Brant.

  Campton’s first impression, while they shook hands under cover of Mr. Mayhew’s rolling periods, was of his former wife’s gift of adaptation. She had made herself a nurse’s face; not a theatrical imitation of it like Mme. de Dolmetsch’s, nor yet the face of a nurse on a war-poster, like Mrs. Talkett’s. Her lovely hair smoothed away under her strict coif, her chin devoutly framed in linen, Mrs. Brant look serious, tender and efficient. Was it possible that she had found her vocation?

  She gave him a glance of alarm, but his eyes must have told her that he had not come about George, for with a reassured smile she laid a finger on her lip and pointed to the platform; Campton noticed that her nails were as beautifully polished as ever.

  Mr. Mayhew was saying: “All that I have to give, yes, all that is most precious to me, I am ready to surrender, to offer up, to lay down in the Great Struggle which is to save the world from barbarism. I, who was one of the first Victims of that barbarism. ..

  He paused and looked impressively at the bales of blankets. The piano filled in the pause, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, without changing her attitude, almost without moving her lips, sang a few noted of lamentation.

  “Of that hideous barbarism” Mr. Mayhew began again. “I repeat that I stand here ready to give up everything I hold most dear”

  “Do stop him,” Campton whispered to Mrs. Brant.

  Little Mrs. Talkett, with the quick intuition he had noted in her, sprang up and threaded her way to the stage. Mme. de Dolmetsch flowed from one widowed pose into another, and Mr. Mayhew, majestically descending, approached Mrs. Brant.

  “You agree with me, I hope? You feel that anything more than Mme. de Dolmetsch’s beautiful voice—anything in the way of a choral accompaniment—would only weaken my effect? Where the facts are so overwhelming it is enough to state them; that is,” Mr. Mayhew added modestly, “if they are stated vigorously and tersely—as I hope they are.”

  Mme. do Dolmetsch, with the gesture of a marble mourner torn from her cenotaph, glided up behind him and laid her hand in Campton’s.

  “Dear friend, you’ve heard? … You remember our talk? I am Cassandra, cursed with the hideous gift of divination.” Tears rained down her cheeks, washing off the paint like mud swept by a shower. “My only comfort,” she added, fixing her perfect eyes on Mr. Mayhew, “is to help our great good friend in the crusade against the assassins of my Ladislas.”

  Mrs. Talkett had said a word to Mr. Mayhew. Campton saw his complacent face go to pieces as if it had been vitrioled.

  “Benny—Benny” he screamed, “Benny hurt? My Benny? It’s some mistake! What makes you think?” His eyes met Campton’s.

  “Oh, my God! Why, he’s my sister’s child!” he cried, plunging his face into his soft manicured hands.

  In the cab to which Campton led him, he continued to sob with the full-throated sobs of a large invertebrate distress, beating his breast for an unfindable handkerchief, and, when he found it, immediately weeping it into pulp.

  Campton had meant to leave him at the bank; but when the taxi stopped Mr. Mayhew was in too pitiful a plight for the painter to resist his entreaty.

  “It was you who saw Benny last—you can’t leave me!” the poor man implored; and Campton followed him up the majestic stairway.

  Their names were taken in to Mr. Brant, and with a motion of wonder at the unaccountable humours of fate, Campton found himself for the first time entering the banker’s private office.

  Mr. Brant was elsewhere in the great glazed labyrinth, and while the visitors waited, the painter’s registering eye took in the details of the room, from the Barye cire-perdue on a peach-coloured marble mantel to the blue morocco armchairs about a giant writing-table. On the table was an electric lamp in a celadon vase, and just the right number of neatly folded papers lay under a paper-weight of Chinese crystal. The room was as tidy as an expensive stage-setting or the cage of a well-kept canary: the only object marring its order was a telegram lying open on the desk.

  Mr. Brant, grey and glossy, slipped in on noiseless patent leather. He shook hands with Mr. Mayhew, bowed stiffly but deprecatingly to Campton, gave his usual cough, and said: “Th
is is terrible.”

  And suddenly, as the three men sat there, so impressive and important and powerless, with that fatal telegram marring the tidiness of the desk, Campton murmured to himself: “If this thing were to happen to me I couldn’t bear it… I simply couldn’t bear it…”

  Benny Upsher was not dead—at least his death was not certain. He had been seen to fall in a surprise attack near Neuve Chapelle; the telegram, from his commanding officer, reported him as “wounded and missing.”

  The words had taken on a hideous significance in the last months. Freezing to death between the lines, mutilation and torture, or weeks of slow agony in German hospitals: these were the alternative visions associated with the now familiar formula. Mr. Mayhew had spent a part of his time collecting details about the treatment of those who had fallen, alive but wounded, into German hands; and Campton guessed that as he sat there every one of these details, cruel, sanguinary, remorseless, had started to life, and that all their victims wore the face of Benny.

  The wretched man sat speechless, so unhinged and swinging loose in his grief that Mr. Brant and Campton could only look on, following the thoughts he was thinking, seeing the sights he was seeing, and each avoiding the other’s eye lest they should betray to one another the secret of their shared exultation at George’s safety.

  Finally Mr. Mayhew was put in charge of a confidential clerk, who was to go with him to the English Military Mission in the hope of getting further information. He went away, small and shrunken, with the deprecating smile of a man who seeks to ward off a blow; as he left the room Campton heard him say timidly to the clerk: “No doubt you speak French, sir? The words I want don’t seem to come to me.”

  Campton had meant to leave at the same time; but some vague impulse held him back. He remembered George’s postscript: “Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy,” and wished he could think of some friendly phrase to ease off his leave-taking. Mr. Brant seemed to have the same wish. He stood, erect and tightly buttoned, one small hand resting on the arm of his desk-chair, as though he were posing for a cabinet size, with the photographer telling him to look natural. His lids twitched behind his protective glasses, and his upper lip, which was as straight as a ruler, detached itself by a hair’s breadth from the lower; but no word came.

  Campton glanced up and down the white-panelled walls, and spoke abruptly.

  “There was no reason on earth,” he said, “why poor young Upsher should ever have been in this thing.”

  Mr. Brant bowed.

  “This sort of crazy impulse to rush into other people’s rows,” Campton continued with rising vehemence, “is of no more use to a civilized state than any other unreasoned instinct. At bottom it’s nothing but what George calls the baseball spirit: just an ignorant passion for fisticuffs.”

  Mr. Brant looked at him intently. “When did—George say that?” he asked, with his usual cough before the name.

  Campton coloured. “Oh—er—some time ago: in the very beginning, I think. It was the view of most thoughtful young fellows at that time.”

  “Quite so,” said Mr. Brant, cautiously stroking his moustache.

  Campton’s eyes again wandered about the room.

  “Now, of course”

  “Ah—now.. .”

  The two men looked at each other, and Campton held out his hand. Mr. Brant, growing pink about the forehead, extended his dry fingers, and they shook hands in silence.

  

  XVIII.

  In the street Campton looked about him with the same confused sense as when he had watched Fortin-Lescluze driving away to Chalous, his dead son’s image in his eyes.

  Each time that Campton came in contact with people on whom this calamity had fallen he grew more acutely aware of his own inadequacy. If he had been Fortin-Lescluze it would have been impossible for him to go back to Châlons and resume his task. If he had been Harvey Mayhew, still less could he have accommodated himself to the intolerable, the really inconceivable, thought that Benny Upsher had vanished into that fiery furnace like a crumpled letter tossed into a grate. Young Fortin was defending his country—but Upsher, in God’s name what was Benny Upsher of Connecticut doing in a war between the continental powers?

  Suddenly Campton remembered that he had George’s letter in his pocket, and that he had meant to go back with it to Mrs. Brant’s. He had started out that morning full of the good intentions the letter had inspired; but now he had no heart to carry them out. Yet George had said: “Let mother know, and explain, please”; and such an injunction could not be disregarded.

  He was still hesitating on a street corner when he remembered that Miss Anthony was probably on her way home for luncheon, and that if he made haste he might find her despatching her hurried meal. It was instinctive with him, in difficult hours, to turn to her, less for counsel than for shelter; her simple unperplexed view of things was as comforting as his mother’s solution of the dark riddles he used to propound in the nursery.

  He found her in her little dining-room, with Delft plates askew on imitation Cordova leather, and a Death’s Head Pennon and a Prussian helmet surmounting the nymph in cast bronze on the mantelpiece. In entering he faced the relentless light of a ground-glass window opening on an air-shaft; and Miss Anthony, flinging him a look, dropped her fork and sprang up crying: “George”

  “George—why George?” Campton recovered his presence of mind under the shock of her agitation. “What made you think of George?”

  “Your—your face,” she stammered, sitting down again. “So absurd of me… But you looked… A seat for monsieur, Jeanne,” she cried over her shoulder to the pantry.

  “Ah—my face? Yes, I suppose so. Benny Upsher has disappeared—I’ve just had to break it to Mayhew.”

  “Oh, that poor young Upsher? How dreadful!” Her own face grew instantly serene. “I’m so sorry—so very sorry… Yes, yes, you shall lunch with me—I know there’s another cutlet,” she insisted.

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t.”

  “Well, then, I’ve finished.” She led the way into the drawing-room. There it was her turn to face the light, and he saw that her own features were as perturbed as she had apparently discovered his to be.

  “Poor Benny, poor boy!” she repeated, in the happy voice she might have had if she had been congratulating Campton on the lad’s escape. He saw that she was still thinking not of Upsher but of George, and her inability to fit her intonation to her words betrayed the violence of her relief. But why had she imagined George to be in danger?

  Campton recounted the scene at which he had just assisted, and while she continued to murmur her sympathy he asked abruptly: “Why on earth should you have been afraid for George?”

  Miss Anthony had taken her usual armchair. It was placed, as the armchairs of elderly ladies usually are, with its high back to the light, and Campton could no longer observe the discrepancy between her words and her looks. This probably gave her laugh its note of confidence. “My dear, if you were to cut me open George’s name would run out of every vein,” she said.

  “But in that tone—it was your tone. You thought he’d been—that something had happened,” Campton insisted. “How could it, where he is?”

  She shrugged her shoulders in the “foreign” way she had picked up in her youth. The gesture was as incongruous as her slang, but it had become part of her physical self, which lay in a loose mosaic of incongruities over the solid crystal block of her character.

  “Why, indeed? I suppose there are risks everywhere, aren’t there?”

  “I don’t know.” He pulled out the letter he had received that morning.

  A sudden light had illuminated it, and his hand shook. “I don’t even know where George is any longer.”

  She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then asked calmly: “What do you mean?”

  “Here—look at this. We’re to write to his base. I’m to tell his mother of the change.” He waited, cursing the faint winter light, and the protecting back
of her chair. “What can it mean,” he broke out, “except that he’s left Sainte-Menehould, that he’s been sent elsewhere, and that he doesn’t want us to find out where?”

  Miss Anthony bent her long nose over the page. Her hand held the letter steadily, and he guessed, as she perused it, that she had had one of the same kind, and had already drawn her own conclusions. What they were, that first startled “George!” seemed to say. But would she ever let Campton see as far into her thoughts again? He continued to watch her hands patiently, since nothing was to be discovered of her face. The hands folded the letter with precision, and handed it back to him.

  “Yes: I see why you thought that—one might have,” she surprised him by conceding. Then, darting at his unprotected face a gaze he seemed to feel though he could not see it: “If it had meant that George had been ordered to the front, how would you have felt?” she demanded.

  He had not expected the question, and though in the last weeks he had so often propounded it to himself, it caught him in the chest like a blow. A sense of humiliation, a longing to lay his weakness bare, suddenly rose in him, and he bowed his head. “I couldn’t … I couldn’t bear it,” he stammered.

  She was silent for an interval; then she stood up, and laying her hand on his shaking shoulder crossed the room to a desk in which he knew she kept her private papers. Her key clinked, and a moment later she handed him a letter. It was in George’s writing, and dated on the same day as his own.

  “Dearest old girl, nothing new but my address. Hereafter please write to our Base. This order has just been lowered from the empyrean at the end of an endless reel of red tape. What it means nobody knows. It does not appear to imply an immediate change of Headquarters; but even if such a change comes, my job is likely to remain the same. I’m getting used to it, and no wonder, for one day differeth not from another, and I’ve had many of them now. Take care of Dad and mother, and of your matchless self. I’m writing to father today. Your George the First—and Last (or I’ll know why).”