Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  “I don’t mean,” he went on hastily, “that Brant’s not right: of course there’s nothing to be afraid of. I can’t imagine why you thought there was.”

  She hung her head. “Sometimes when I hear the other women—other mothers—I feel as if our turn must come too. Even at Sainte-Menehould a shell might hit the house. Anderson said the artillery fire seemed so near.”

  He made no answer, and she sat silent, without apparent thought of leaving. Finally he said: “I was just going out—”

  She stood up. “Oh, yes—that reminds me. I came to ask you to come with me.”

  “With you?”

  “The motor’s waiting—you must.” She laid her hand on his arm. “To see Olida, the new clairvoyante. Everybody goes to her—everybody who’s anxious about anyone. Even the scientific people believe in her. She’s told people the most extraordinary things—it seems she warned Daisy de Dolmetsch… Well, I’d rather know!” she burst out passionately.

  Campton smiled. “She’ll tell you that George is back at his desk.”

  “Well, then—isn’t that worth it? Please don’t refuse me!”

  He disengaged himself gently. “My poor Julia, go by all means if it will reassure you.”

  “Ah, but you’ve got to come too. you can’t say no: Madge Talkett tells me that if the two nearest go together Olida sees so much more clearly—especially a father and mother,” she added hastily, as if conscious of the inopportune “nearest.” After a moment she went on: “Even Mme. de Tranlay’s been; Daisy de Dolmetsch met her on the stairs. Olida told her that her youngest boy, from whom she’d had no news for weeks, was all right, and coming home on leave. Mme. de Tranlay didn’t know Daisy, except by sight, but she stopped her to tell her. Only fancy—the last person she would have spoken to in ordinary times! But she was so excited and happy! And two days afterward the boy turned up safe and sound. You must come!” she insisted.

  Campton was seized with a sudden deep compassion for all these women groping for a ray of light in the blackness. It moved him to think of Mme. de Tranlay’s proud figure climbing a clairvoyante’s stairs.

  “I’ll come if you want me to,” he said.

  They drove to the Batignolles quarter. Mrs. Brant’s lips were twitching under her veil, and as the motor stopped she said childishly: “I’ve never been to this kind of place before.”

  “I should hope not,” Campton rejoined. He himself, during the Russian lady’s rule, had served an apprenticeship among the soothsayers, and come away disgusted with the hours wasted in their company. He suddenly remembered the Spanish girl in the little white house near the railway, who had told his fortune in the hot afternoons with cards and olive-stones, and had found, by irrefutable signs, that he and she would “come together” again. “Well, it was better than this pseudo-scientific humbug,” he mused, “because it was picturesque—and so was she—and she believed in it.”

  Mrs. Brant rang, and Campton followed her into a narrow hall. A servant-woman showed them into a salon which was as commonplace as a doctor’s waiting-room. On the mantelpiece were vases of pampas grass, and a stuffed monkey swung from the electrolier. Evidently Mme. Olida was superior to the class of fortune-tellers who prepare a special stage-setting, and no astrologer’s robe or witch’s kitchen was to be feared.

  The maid led them across a plain dining-room into an inner room. The shutters were partly closed, and the blinds down. A voluminous woman in loose black rose from a sofa. Gold ear-rings gleamed under her oiled black hair—and suddenly, through the billows of flesh, and behind the large pale mask, Campton recognized the Spanish girl who used to read his fortune in the house by the railway. Her eyes rested a moment on Mrs. Brant; then they met his with the same heavy stare. But he noticed that her hands, which were small and fat, trembled a little as she pointed to two chairs.

  “Sit down, please,” she said in a low rough voice, speaking in French. The door opened again, and a young man with Levantine eyes and a showy necktie looked in. She said sharply: “No,” and he disappeared. Campton noticed that a large emerald flashed on his manicured hand. Mme. Olida continued to look at her visitors.

  Mrs. Brant wiped her dry lips and stammered: “We’re his parents—a son at the front…”

  Mme. Olida fell back in a trance-like attitude, let her lids droop over her magnificent eyes, and rested her head against a soiled sofa-pillow. Presently she held out both hands.

  “You are his parents? Yes? Give me each a hand, please.” As her cushioned palm touched Campton’s he thought he felt a tremor of recognition, and saw, in the half-light, the tremor communicate itself to her lids. He grasped her hand firmly, and she lifted her eyes, looked straight into his with her heavy velvety stare, and said: “You should hold my hand more loosely; the currents must not be compressed.” She turned her palm upward, so that his finger-tips rested on it as if on a keyboard; he noticed that she did not do the same with the hand she had placed in Mrs. Brant’s.

  Suddenly he remembered that one sultry noon, lying under the olives, she had taught him, by signals tapped on his own knee, how to say what he chose to her without her brothers’ knowing it. He looked at the huge woman, seeking the curve of the bowed upper lip on which what used to be a faint blue shadow had now become a line as thick as her eyebrows, and recalling how her laugh used to lift the lip above her little round teeth while she threw back her head, showing the Agnus Dei in her neck. Now her mouth was like a withered flower, and in a crease of her neck a string of pearls was embedded.

  “Take hands, please,” she commanded. Julia gave Campton her ungloved hand, and he sat between the two women.

  “You are the parents? You want news of your son—ah, like so many!” Mme. Olida closed her eyes again.

  “To know where he is—whereabouts—that is what we want,” Mrs. Brant whispered.

  Mme. Olida sat as if labouring with difficult visions. The noises of the street came faintly through the closed windows and a smell of garlic and cheap scent oppressed Campton’s lungs and awakened old associations. With a final effort of memory he fixed his eyes on the clairvoyante’s darkened mask, and tapped her palm once or twice. She neither stirred nor looked at him.

  “I see—I see” she began in the consecrated phrase. “A veil—a thick veil of smoke between me and a face which is young and fair, with a short nose and reddish hair: thick, thick, thick hair, exactly like this gentleman’s when he was young…”

  Mrs. Brant’s hand trembled in Campton’s. “It’s true,” she whispered, “before your hair turned grey it used to be as red as Georgie’s.”

  “The veil grows denser—there are awful noises; there’s a face with blood—but not that first face. This is a very young man, as innocent as when he was born, with blue eyes like flax-flowers, but blood, blood … why do I see that face? Ah, now it is on a hospital pillow—not your son’s face, the other; there is no one near, no one but some German soldiers laughing and drinking; the lips move, the hands are stretched out in agony; but no one notices. It is a face that has something to say to the gentleman; not to you, Madame. The uniform is different—is it an English uniform? … Ah, now the face turns grey; the eyes shut, there is foam on the lips. Now it is gone—there’s another man’s head on the pillow… Now, now your son’s face comes back; but not near those others. The smoke has cleared… I see a desk and papers; your son is writing…”

  “Oh,” gasped Mrs. Brant.

  “If you squeeze my hands you arrest the current,” Mme. Olida reminded her. There was another interval; Campton felt his wife’s fingers beating between his like trapped birds. The heat and darkness oppressed him; beads of sweat came out on his forehead. Did the woman really see things, and was that face with the blood on it Benny Upsher’s?

  Mme. Olida droned on. “It is your son who is writing—the young man with the very thick hair. He is writing to you—trying to explain something. Perhaps you have hoped to see him lately? That is it; he is telling you why it could not be. He is sitting
quietly in a room. There is no smoke.” She released Mrs. Brant’s hand and Campton’s. “Go home, Madame. You are fortunate. Perhaps his letter will reach you tomorrow.”

  Mrs. Brant stood up sobbing. She found her gold bag and pushed it toward Campton. He had been feeling in his own pocket for money; but as he drew it forth Mme. Olida put back his hand. “No. I am superstitious; it’s so seldom that I can give good news. Bonjour, madame, bonjour, monsieur. I commend your son to the blessed Virgin and to all the saints and angels.”

  Campton put Julia into the motor. She was still crying, but her tears were radiant. “Isn’t she wonderful? Didn’t you see how she seem to recognize George? There’s no mistaking his hair! How could she have known what it was like? Don’t think me foolish—I feel so comforted!”

  “Of course; you’ll hear from him tomorrow,” Campton said. He was touched by her maternal passion, and ashamed of having allowed her so small a share in his jealous worship of his son. He walked away, thinking of a young man dying in a German hospital, and of the other man’s face succeeding his on the pillow.

  

  XXII.

  Two days later, to Campton’s surprise, Anderson Brant appeared in the morning at the studio.

  Campton, finishing a late breakfast in careless studio-garb, saw his visitor peer cautiously about, as though fearing undressed models behind the screens or empty beer-bottles under the tables. It was the first time that Mr. Brant had entered the studio since his attempt to buy George’s portrait, and Campton guessed at once that he had come again about George.

  He looked at the painter shyly, as if oppressed by the indiscretion of intruding at that hour.

  “It was my—Mrs. Brant who insisted—when she got this letter,” he brought out between precautionary coughs.

  Campton looked at him tolerantly: a barrier seemed to have fallen between them since their brief exchange of words about Benny Upsher. The letter, as Campton had expected, was a line from George to his mother, written two days after Mr. Brant’s visit to Sainte-Menehould. It expressed, in George’s usual staccato style, his regret at having been away. “Hard luck, when one is riveted to the same square yard of earth for weeks on end, to have just happened to be somewhere else the day Uncle Andy broke through.” It was always the same tone of fluent banter, in which Campton fancied he detected a lurking stridency, like the scrape of an overworked gramophone containing only comic disks.

  “Ah, well—his mother must be satisfied,” Campton said as he gave the letter back.

  “Oh, completely. So much so that I’ve induced her to go off for a while to Biarritz. The doctor finds her overdone; she’d got it into her head that George had been sent to the front; I couldn’t convince her to the contrary.”

  Campton looked at him. “You yourself never believed it?”

  Mr. Brant, who had half risen, as though feeling that his errand was done, slid back into his seat and clasped his small hands on his agate-headed stick.

  “Oh, never.”

  “It was not,” Campton pursued, “with that idea that you went to Sainte-Menehould?”

  Mr. Brant glanced at him in surprise. “No. On the contrary”

  “On the contrary?”

  “I understood from—from his mother that, in the circumstances, you were opposed to his asking for leave; thought it unadvisable, that is. So, as it was such a long time since we’d seen him” The “we,” pulling him up short, spread a brick-red blush over his baldness.

  “Not longer than since I have—but then I’ve not your opportunities,” Campton retorted, the sneer breaking out in spite of him. Though he had grown kindly disposed toward Mr. Brant when they were apart, the old resentments still broke out in his presence.

  Mr. Brant clasped and unclasped the knob of his stick. “I took the first chance that offered; I had his mother to think of.” Campton made no answer, and he continued: “I was sorry to hear you thought I’d perhaps been imprudent.”

  “There’s no perhaps about it,” Campton retorted. “Since you say you were not anxious about the boy I can’t imagine why you made the attempt.”

  Mr. Brant was silent. He seemed overwhelmed by the other’s disapprobation, and unable to find any argument in his own defence. “I never dreamed it could cause any trouble,” he said at length.

  “That’s the ground you’ve always taken in your interference with my son!” Campton had risen, pushing back his chair, and Mr. Brant stood up also. They faced each other without speaking.

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Brant began, “that you should take such a view. It seemed to me natural..when Mr. Jorgenstein gave me the chance—”

  “Jorgenstein! It was Jorgenstein who took you to the front? Took you to see my son?” Campton threw his head back and laughed. “That’s complete—that’s really complete!”

  Mr. Brant reddened as if the laugh had been a blow. He stood very erect, his lips as tightly closed as a shut penknife. He had the attitude of a civilian under fire, considerably perturbed, but obliged to set the example of fortitude.

  Campton looked at him. At last he had Mr. Brant at a disadvantage. Their respective situations were reversed, and he saw that the banker was aware of it, and oppressed by the fear that he might have done harm to George. He evidently wanted to say all this and did not know how.

  His distress moved Campton, in whose ears the sound of his own outburst still echoed unpleasantly. If only Mr. Brant would have kept out of his way he would have found it so easy to be fair to him!

  “I’m sorry,” he began in a quieter tone. “I dare say I’m unjust—perhaps it’s in the nature of our relation. Can’t you understand how I’ve felt, looking on helplessly all these years, while you’ve done for the boy everything I wanted to do for him myself? Haven’t you guessed why I jumped at my first success, and nursed my celebrity till I’d got half the fools in Europe lining up to be painted?” His excitement was mastering him again, and he went on hurriedly: “Do you suppose I’d have wasted all these precious years over their stupid faces if I hadn’t wanted to make my son independent of you? And he would have been, if the war hadn’t come; been my own son again and nobody else’s, leading his own life, whatever he chose it to be, instead of having to waste his youth in your bank, learning how to multiply your millions.”

  The futility of this retrospect, and the inconsistency of his whole attitude, exasperated Campton more than anything his visitor could do or say, and he stopped, embarrassed by the sound of his own words, yet seeing no escape save to bury them under more and more. But Mr. Brant had opened his lips.

  “They’ll be his, you know: the millions,” he said.

  Campton’s anger dropped: he felt Mr. Brant at last too completely at his mercy. He waited for a moment before speaking.

  “You tried to buy his portrait once—you remember I told you it was not for sale,” he then said.

  Mr. Brant stood motionless, grasping his stick in one hand and stroking his moustache with the other. For a while he seemed to be considering Campton’s words without feeling their sting. “It was not the money …” he stammered out at length, from the depth of some unutterable plea for understanding; then he added: “I wish you a good morning,” and walked out with his little stiff steps.

  

  XXIII.

  Campton was thoroughly ashamed of what he had said to Mr. Brant, or rather of his manner of saying it. If he could have put the same facts quietly, ironically, without forfeiting his dignity, and with the added emphasis which deliberateness and composure give, he would scarcely have regretted the opportunity. He had always secretly accused himself of a lack of courage in accepting Mr. Brant’s heavy benefactions for George when the boy was too young to know what they might pledge him to; and it had been a disappointment that George, on reaching the age of discrimination, had not appeared to find the burden heavy, or the obligations unpleasant.

  Campton, having accepted Mr. Brant’s help, could hardly reproach his son for feeling grateful for it, and had therefor
e thought it “more decent” to postpone disparagement of their common benefactor till his own efforts had set them both free. Even then, it would be impossible to pay off the past—but the past might have been left to bury itself. Now his own wrath had dug it up, and he had paid for the brief joy of casting its bones in Mr. Brant’s face by a deep disgust at his own weakness.

  All these things would have weighed on him even more if the outer weight of events had not been so much heavier. He had not returned to Mrs. Talkett’s since the banker’s visit; he did not wish to meet Jorgenstein, and his talk with the banker, and his visit to the clairvoyante, had somehow combined to send that whole factitious world tumbling about his ears. It was absurd to attach any importance to poor Olida’s vaticinations; but the vividness of her description of the baby-faced boy dying in a German hospital haunted Campton’s nights. If it were not the portrait of Benny Upsher it was at least that of hundreds and thousands of lads like him, who were thus groping and agonizing and stretching out vain hands, while in Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room well-fed men and expensive women heroically “forgot the war.” Campton, seeking to expiate his own brief forgetfulness by a passion of renewed activity, announced to Boylston the next afternoon that he was coming back to the office.

  Boylston hardly responded: he looked up from his desk with a face so strange that Campton broke off to cry out: “What’s happened?”

  The young man held out a newspaper. “They’ve done it—they’ve done it!” he shouted. Across the page the name of the Lusitania blazed out like the writing on the wall.

  The Berserker light on Boylston’s placid features transformed him into an avenging cherub. “Ah, now we’re in it at last!” he exulted, as if the horror of the catastrophe were already swallowed up in its result. The two looked at each other without further words; but the older man’s first thought had been for his son. Now, indeed, America was “in it”: the gross tangible proof for which her government had forced her to wait was there in all its unimagined horror. Cant and cowardice in high places had drugged and stupefied her into the strange belief that she was too proud to fight for others; and here she was brutally forced to fight for herself. Campton waited with a straining heart for his son’s first comment on the new fact that they were “in it.”