Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  “How can I tell?” he grumbled doubtfully, looking from the faces of the two travellers to their unrecognizable photographs.

  Mr. Brant was already feeling for his pocket, and furtively extracting a bank-note.

  “For God’s sake—not that!” Campton cried, bringing his hand down on the banker’s. Leaning over, he spoke to the sentinel. “My son’s dying at the front. Can’t you see it when you look at me?”

  The man looked, and slowly gave back the paper. “You can pass,” he said, shouldering his rifle.

  The motor shot on, and the two men drew back into their corners. Mr. Brant fidgeted with his eye-glasses, and after an interval coughed again. “I must thank you,” he began, “for—for saving me just now from an inexcusable blunder. It was done mechanically … one gets into the habit…”

  “Quite so,” said Campton drily. “But there are cases”

  “Of course—of course.”

  Silence fell once more. Mr. Brant sat bolt upright, his profile detached against the wintry fields. Campton, sunk into his corner, glanced now and then at the neat grey silhouette, in which the perpendicular glint of the eye-glass nearest him was the only point of light. He said to himself that the man was no doubt suffering horribly; but he was not conscious of any impulse of compassion. He and Mr. Brant were like two strangers pinned down together in a railway-smash: the shared agony did not bring them nearer. On the contrary, Campton, as the hours passed, felt himself more and more exasperated by the mute anguish at his side. What right had this man to be suffering as he himself was suffering, what right to be here with him at all? It was simply in the exercise of what the banker called his “habit”—the habit of paying, of buying everything, people and privileges and possessions—that he had acquired this ghastly claim to share in an agony which was not his.

  “I shan’t even have my boy to myself on his death-bed,” the father thought in desperation; and the mute presence at his side became once more the symbol of his own failure.

  The motor, with frequent halts, continued to crawl slowly on between lorries, field-kitchens, artillery wagons, companies of haggard infantry returning to their cantonments, and more and more vanloads of troops pressing forward; it seemed to Campton that hours elapsed before Mr. Brant again spoke.

  “This must be Amiens,” he said, in a voice even lower than usual.

  The father roused himself and looked out. They were passing through the streets of a town swarming with troops—but he was still barely conscious of what he looked at. He perceived that he had been half-asleep, and dreaming of George as a little boy, when he used to have such bad colds. Campton remembered in particular the day he had found the lad in bed, in a scarlet sweater, in his luxurious overheated room, reading the first edition of Lavengro. It was on that day that he and his son had first really got to know each other; but what was it that had marked the date to George? The fact that Mr. Brant, learning of his joy in the book, had instantly presented it to him—with the price-label left inside the cover.

  “And it’ll be worth a lot more than that by the time you’re grown up,” Mr. Brant had told his step-son; to which George was recorded to have answered sturdily: “No, it won’t, if I find other stories I like better.”

  Miss Anthony had assisted at the conversation and reported it triumphantly to Campton; but the painter, who had to save up to give his boy even a simple present, could see in the incident only one more attempt to rob him of his rights. “They won’t succeed, though, they won’t succeed: they don’t know how to go about it, thank the Lord,” he had said.

  But they had succeeded after all; what better proof of it was there than Mr. Brant’s tacit right to be sitting here beside him today; than the fact that but for Mr. Brant it might have been impossible for Campton to get to his boy’s side in time?

  Oh, that pitiless incessant hammering of the guns! As the travellers advanced the noise grew louder, fiercer, more unbroken; the closely-fitted panes of the car rattled and danced like those of an old omnibus. Sentinels stopped the chauffeur more frequently; Mr. Brant had to produce the blue paper again and again. The day was wearing on—Campton began again to be aware of a sick weariness, a growing remoteness and confusion of mind. Through it he perceived that Mr. Brant, diving into deep recesses of upholstery, had brought out a silver sandwich-box, a flask and glasses. As by magic they stood on a shiny shelf which slid out of another recess, and Mr. Brant was proffering the box. “It’s a long way yet; you’ll need all your strength,” he said.

  Campton, who had half turned from the invitation, seized a sandwich and emptied one of the glasses. Mr. Brant was right; he must not let himself float away into the void, seductive as its drowsy shimmer was.

  His wits returned, and with them a more intolerable sense of reality. He was all alive now. Every crash of the guns seemed to tear a piece of flesh from his body; and it was always the piece nearest the heart. The nurse’s few lines had said: “A shell wound: the right arm fractured, fear for the lungs.” And one of these awful crashes had done it: bursting in mystery from that innocent-looking sky, and rushing inoffensively over hundreds of other young men till it reached its destined prey, found George, and dug a red grave for him. Campton was convinced now that his son was dead. It was not only that he had received the Legion of Honour; it was the appalling all-destroying thunder of the shells as they went on crashing and bursting. What could they leave behind them but mismated fragments? Gathering up all his strength in the effort not to recoil from the vision, Campton saw his son’s beautiful body like a carcass tumbled out of a butcher’s cart…

  “Doullens,” said Mr. Brant.

  They were in a town, and the motor had turned into the court of a great barrack-like building. Before them stood a line of empty stretchers such as Campton had seen at Châlons. A young doctor in a cotton blouse was lighting a cigarette and laughing with a nurse—laughing! At regular intervals the cannonade shook the windows; it seemed the heart-beat of the place. Campton noticed that many of the window-panes had been broken, and patched with paper.

  Inside they found another official, who called to another nurse as she passed by laden with fresh towels. She disappeared into a room where heaps of bloody linen were being stacked into baskets, returned, looked at Campton and nodded. He looked back at her blunt tired features and kindly eyes, and said to himself that they had perhaps been his son’s last sight on earth.

  The nurse smiled.

  “It’s three flights up,” she said; “he’ll be glad.”

  Glad! He was not dead, then; he could even be glad! In the staggering rush of relief the father turned instinctively to Mr. Brant; he felt that there was enough joy to be shared. But Mr. Brant, though he must have heard what the nurse had said, was moving away; he did not seem to understand.

  “This way” Campton called after him, pointing to the nurse, who was already on the first step of the stairs.

  Mr. Brant looked slightly puzzled; then, as the other’s meaning reached him, he coloured a little, bent his head stiffly, and waved his stick toward the door.

  “Thanks,” he said, “I think I’ll take a stroll first… stretch my legs . ..” and Campton, with a rush of gratitude, understood that he was to be left alone with his son.

  

  XXV.

  He followed his guide up the steep flights, which seemed to become buoyant and lift him like waves. It was as if the muscle that always dragged back his lame leg had suddenly regained its elasticity. He floated up as one mounts stairs in a dream. A smell of disinfectants hung in the cold air, and once, through a half-open door, a sickening odour came: he remembered it at Châlons, and Fortin’s murmured: “Gangrene—ah, if only we could get them sooner!”

  How soon had they got his boy, Campton wondered? The letter, mercifully sent by hand to Paris, had reached him on the third day after George’s arrival at the Doullens hospital; but he did not yet know how long before that the shell-splinter had done its work. The nurse did not know either. How co
uld she remember? They had so many! The administrator would look up the files and tell him. Only there was no time for that now.

  On a landing Campton heard a babble and scream: a nauseating scream in a queer bleached voice that might have been man, woman or monkey’s. Perhaps that was what the French meant by “a white voice”: this voice which was as featureless as some of the poor men’s obliterated faces! Campton shot an anguished look at his companion, and she understood and shook her head. “Oh, no: that’s in the big ward. It’s the way they scream after a dressing…”

  She opened a door, and he was in a room with three beds in it, wooden pallets hastily knocked together and spread with rough grey blankets. In spite of the cold, flies still swarmed on the unwashed panes, and there were big holes in the fly-net over the bed nearest the window. Under the net lay a middle-aged bearded man, heavily bandaged about the chest and left arm: he was snoring, his mouth open, his gaunt cheeks drawn in with the fight for breath. Campton said to himself that if his own boy lived he should like some day to do something for this poor devil who was his roommate. Then he looked about him and saw that the two other beds were empty.

  He drew back.

  The nurse was bending over the bearded man. “He’ll wake presently—I’ll leave you”; and she slipped out. Campton looked again at the stranger; then his glance travelled to the scarred brown hand on the sheet, a hand with broken nails and blackened finger-tips. It was George’s hand, his son’s, swollen, disfigured but unmistakable. The father knelt down and laid his lips on it.

  “What was the first thing you felt?” Adele Anthony asked him afterward: and he answered: “Nothing.”

  “Yes—at the very first, I know: it’s always like that. But the first thing after you began to feel anything?”

  He considered, and then said slowly: “The difference.”

  “The difference in him?”

  “In him—in life—in everything.”

  Miss Anthony, who understood as a rule, was evidently puzzled. “What kind of a difference?”

  “Oh, a complete difference.” With that she had to be content.

  The sense of it had first come to Campton when the bearded man, raising his lids, looked at him from far off with George’s eyes, and touched him, very feebly, with George’s hand. It was in the moment of identifying his son that he felt the son he had known to be lost to him forever.

  George’s lips were moving, and the father laid his ear to them; perhaps these were last words that his boy was saying.

  “Old Dad—in a motor?”

  Campton nodded.

  The fact seemed faintly to interest George, who continued to examine him with those distant eyes.

  “Uncle Andy’s?”

  Campton nodded again.

  “Mother?”

  “She’s coming too—very soon.”

  George’s lips were screwed into a whimsical smile. “I must have a shave first,” he said, and drowsed off again, his hand in Campton’s…

  “The other gentleman—?” the nurse questioned the next morning.

  Campton had spent the night in the hospital, stretched on the floor at his son’s threshold. It was a breach of rules, but for once the major had condoned it. As for Mr. Brant, Campton had forgotten all about him, and at first did not know what the nurse meant. Then he woke with a start to the consciousness of his fellow-traveller’s nearness. Mr. Brant, the nurse explained, had come to the hospital early, and had been waiting below for the last two hours. Campton, almost as gaunt and unshorn as his son, pulled himself to his feet and went down. In the hall the banker, very white, but smooth and trim as ever, was patiently measuring the muddy flags.

  “Less temperature this morning,” Campton called from the last flight.

  “Oh,” stammered Mr. Brant, red and pale by turns.

  Campton smiled haggardly and pulled himself together in an effort of communicativeness. “Look here—he’s asked for you; you’d better go up. Only for a few minutes, please; he’s awfully weak.”

  Mr. Brant, speechless, stood stiffly waiting to be conducted. Campton noticed the mist in his eyes, and took pity on him.

  “I say—where’s the hotel? Just a step away? I’ll go around, then, and get a shave and a wash while you’re with him,” the father said, with a magnanimity which he somehow felt the powers might take account of in their subsequent dealings with George. If the boy was to live Campton could afford to be generous; and he had decided to assume that the boy would live, and to order his behaviour accordingly.

  “I—thank you,” said Mr. Brant, turning toward the stairs.

  “Five minutes at the outside!” Campton cautioned him, and hurried out into the morning air through which the guns still crashed methodically.

  When he got back to the hospital, refreshed and decent, he was surprised, and for a moment alarmed, to find that Mr. Brant had not come down.

  “Sending up his temperature, of course—damn him!” Campton raged, scrambling up the stairs as fast as his stiff leg permitted. But outside of George’s door he saw a small figure patiently mounting guard.

  “I stayed with him less than five minutes; I was merely waiting to thank you.”

  “Oh, that’s all right.” Campton paused, and then made his supreme effort. “How does he strike you?”

  “Hopefully—hopefully. He had his joke as usual,” Mr. Brant said with a twitching smile.

  “Oh, that! But his temperature’s decidedly lower. Of course they may have to take the ball out of the lung; but perhaps before they do it he can be moved from this hell.”

  The two men were silent, the same passion of anxiety consuming them, and no means left of communicating it to each other.

  “I’ll look in again later. Shall I have something to eat sent round to you from the hotel?” Mr. Brant suggested.

  “Oh, thanks—if you would.”

  Campton put out his hand and crushed Mr. Brant’s dry fingers. But for this man he might not have got to his son in time; and this man had not once made use of the fact to press his own claim on George. With pity in his heart, the father, privileged to remain at his son’s bedside, watched Mr. Brant’s small figure retreating alone. How ghastly to sit all day in that squalid hotel, his eyes on his watch, with nothing to do but to wonder and wonder about the temperature of another man’s son!

  The next day was worse; so much worse that everything disappeared from Campton’s view but the present agony of watching, hovering, hanging helplessly on the words of nurse and doctor, and spying on the glances they exchanged behind his back.

  There could be no thought yet of extracting the bullet; a great surgeon, passing through the wards on a hasty tour of inspection, had confirmed this verdict. Oh, to have kept the surgeon there—to have had him at hand to watch for the propitious moment and seize it without an instant’s delay! Suddenly the vision which to Campton had been among the most hideous of all his crowding nightmares—that of George stretched naked on an operating-table, his face hidden by a chloroform mask, and an orderly hurrying away with a pile of red towels like those perpetually carried through the passages below—this vision became to the father’s fevered mind as soothing as a glimpse of Paradise. If only George’s temperature would go down—if only the doctors would pronounce him strong enough to have the bullet taken out! What would anything else matter then? Campton would feel as safe as he used to years ago, when after the recurring months of separation the boy came back from school, and he could take him in his arms and make sure that he was the same Geordie, only bigger, browner, with thicker curlier hair, and tougher muscles under his jacket.

  What if the great surgeon, on his way back from the front, were to pass through the town again that evening, reverse his verdict, and perhaps even perform the operation then and there? Was there no way of prevailing on him to stop and take another look at George on the return? The idea took immediate possession of Campton, crowding out his intolerable anguish, and bringing such relief that for a few seconds he felt as
if some life-saving operation had been performed on himself. As he stood watching the great man’s retreat, followed by doctors and nurses, Mr. Brant suddenly touched his arm, and the eyes of the two met. Campton understood and gasped out: “Yes, yes; we must manage to get him back.”

  Mr. Brant nodded. “At all costs.” He paused, again interrogated Campton’s eyes, and stammered: “You authorize—?”

  “Oh, God—anything!”

  “He’s dined at my house in Paris,” Mr. Brant threw in, as if trying to justify himself.

  “Oh, go—go!” Campton almost pushed him down the stairs. Ten minutes later he reappeared, modest but exultant.

  “Well?”

  “He wouldn’t commit himself, before the others”

  “Oh”

  “But to me, as he was getting into the motor”

  “Well?”

  “Yes: if possible. Somewhere about midnight.”

  Campton turned away, choking, and stumped off toward the tall window at the end of the passage. Below him lay the court. A line of stretchers was being carried across it, not empty this time, but each one with a bloody burden. Doctors, nurses, orderlies hurried to and fro. Drub, drub, drub, went the guns, shaking the windows, rolling their fierce din along the cloudy sky, down the corridors of the hospital and the pavement of the streets, like huge bowls crashing through story above story of a kind of sky-scraping bowling alley.

  “Even the dead underground must hear them!” Campton muttered.

  The word made him shudder superstitiously, and he crept back to George’s door and opened it; but the nurse, within, shook her head.

  “He must sleep after the examination. Better go.”

  Campton turned and saw Mr. Brant waiting. A bell rang twelve. The two, in silence, walked down the stairs, crossed the court (averting their eyes from the stretchers) and went to the hotel to get something to eat.