Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

Midnight came. It passed. No one in the hurried confused world of the hospital had heard of the possibility of the surgeon’s returning. When Campton mentioned it to the nurse she smiled her tired smile, and said “He could have done nothing.”

  Done nothing! How could she know? How could any one, but the surgeon himself? Would he have promised if he had not thought there was some chance? Campton, stretched out on a blanket and his rolled-up coat, lay through the long restless hours staring at the moonlit sky framed by the window of the corridor. Great clouds swept over that cold indifferent vault they seemed like the smoke from the guns which had not once ceased through the night. At last he got up, turned his back on the window, and lay down again facing the stairs. The moonlight unrolled a white strip along the stone floor. A church-bell rang one … two … there were noises and movements below. Campton raised himself, his heart beating all over his body. Steps came echoing up.

  “Careful!” some one called. A stretcher rounded the stair-rail; another, and then another. An orderly with a lantern preceded them, followed by one of the doctors, an old bunched-up man in a muddy uniform, who stopped furtively to take a pinch of snuff. Campton could not believe his eyes; didn’t the hospital people know that every bed on that floor was full? Every bed, that is, but the two in George’s room; and the nurse had given Campton the hope, the promise almost, that as long as his boy was so ill she would keep those empty. “I’ll manage somehow,” she had said.

  For a mad moment Campton was on the point of throwing himself in the way of the tragic procession, barring the threshold with his arms. “What does this mean?” he stammered to the nurse, who had appeared from another room with her little lamp.

  She gave a shrug. “More casualties—every hospital is like this.”

  He stood aside, wrathful, impotent. At least if Brant had been there, perhaps by some offer of money—but how, to whom? Of what earthly use, after all, was Brant’s boasted “influence”? These people would only laugh at him—perhaps put them both out of the hospital!

  He turned despairingly to the nurse. “You might as well have left him in the trenches.”

  “Don’t say that, sir,” she answered; and the echo of his own words horrified him like a sacrilege.

  Two of the stretchers were carried into George’s room. Campton caught a glimpse of George, muttering and tossing; the moonlight lay in the hollows of his bearded face, and again the father had the sense of utter alienation from that dark delirious man who for brief intervals suddenly became his son, and then as suddenly wandered off into strangeness.

  The nurse slipped out of the room and signed to him.

  “Both nearly gone … they won’t trouble him long,” she whispered.

  The man on the third stretcher was taken to a room at the other end of the corridor. Campton watched him being lifted in. He was to lie on the floor, then? For in that room there was certainly no vacancy. But presently he had the answer. The bearers did not come out empty-handed; they carried another man whom they laid on the empty stretcher. Lucky, lucky devil; going, no doubt, to a hospital at the rear! As the procession reached the stairs the lantern swung above the lucky devil’s fact: his eyes stared ceilingward from black orbits. One arm, swinging loose, dangled down, the hand stealthily counting the steps as he descended—and no one troubled, for he was dead.

  At dawn Campton, who must have been asleep, started up, again hearing steps. The surgeon? Oh, if this time it were the surgeon! But only Mr. Brant detached himself from the shadows accumulated in the long corridor: Mr. Brant, crumpled and unshorn, with blood-shot eyes, and gloves on his unconscious hands.

  Campton glared at him resentfully.

  “Well—how about your surgeon? I don’t see him!” he exclaimed.

  Mr. Brant shook his head despondently. “No—I’ve been waiting all night in the court. I thought if he came back I should be the first to catch him. But he has just sent his orderly for instruments; he’s not coming. There’s been terrible fighting”

  Campton saw two tears running down Mr. Brant’s face: they did not move him.

  The banker glanced toward George’s door, full of the question he dared not put.

  Campton answered it. “You want to know how he is? Well, how should he be, with that bullet in him, and the fever eating him inch by inch, and two more wounded men in his room? That’s how he is!” Campton almost shouted.

  Mr. Brant was trembling all over.

  “Two more men—in his room?” he echoed shrilly.

  “Yes—bad cases; dying.” Campton drew a deep breath. “You see there are times when your money and your influence and your knowing everybody are no more use than so much sawdust”

  The nurse opened the door and looked out. “You’re talking too loudly,” she said.

  She shut the door, and the two men stood silent, abashed; finally Mr. Brant turned away. “I’ll go and try again. There must be other surgeons … other ways …” he whispered.

  “Oh, your surgeons … oh, your ways!” Campton sneered after him, in the same whisper.

  

  XXVI.

  From the room where he sat at the foot of George’s glossy white bed, Campton, through the open door, could watch the November sun slanting down a white ward where, in the lane between other white beds, pots of chrysanthemums stood on white-covered tables.

  Through the window his eyes rested incredulously on a court enclosed in monastic arches of grey stone, with squares of turf bordered by box hedges, and a fountain playing. Beyond the court sloped the faded foliage of a park not yet entirely stripped by Channel gales; and on days without wind, instead of the boom of the guns, the roar of the sea came faintly over intervening heights and hollows.

  Campton’s ears were even more incredulous than his eyes. He was gradually coming to believe in George’s white room, the ward beyond, the flowers between the beds, the fountain in the court; but the sound of the sea still came to him, intolerably but unescapably, as the crash of guns. When the impression was too overwhelming he would turn away from the window and cast his glance on the bed; but only to find that the smooth young face on the pillow had suddenly changed into that of the haggard bearded stranger on the wooden pallet at Doullens. And Campton would have to get up, lean over, and catch the twinkle in George’s eyes before the evil spell was broken.

  Few words passed between them. George, after all these days, was still too weak for much talk; and silence had always been Campton’s escape from feeling. He never had the need to speak in times of inward stress, unless it were to vent his anger—as in that hateful scene at Doullens between himself and Mr. Brant. But he was sure that George always knew what was passing through his mind; that when the sea boomed their thoughts flew back together to that other scene, but a few miles and a few days distant, yet already as far off, as much an affair they were both rid of, as a nightmare to a wakened sleeper; and that for a moment the same vision clutched them both, mocking their attempts at indifference.

  Not that the sound, to Campton at any rate, suggested any abstract conception of war. Looking back afterward at this phase of his life he perceived that at no time had he thought so little of the war. The noise of the sea was to him simply the voice of the engine which had so nearly destroyed his son: that association, deeply imbedded in his half-dazed consciousness, left no room for others.

  The general impression of unreality was enhanced by his not having yet been able to learn the details of George’s wounding. After a week during which the boy had hung near death, the great surgeon—returning to Doullens just as Campton had finally ceased to hope for him—had announced that, though George’s state was still grave, he might be moved to a hospital at the rear. So one day, miraculously, the perilous transfer had been made, in one of Mrs. Brant’s own motor-ambulances; and for a week now George had lain in his white bed, hung over by white-gowned Sisters, in an atmosphere of sweetness and order which almost made it seem as if he were a child recovering from illness in his own nursery, or a red-hair
ed baby sparring with dimpled fists at a new world.

  In truth, Campton found his son as hard to get at as a baby; he looked at his father with eyes as void of experience, or at least of any means of conveying it. Campton, at first, could only marvel and wait; and the isolation in which the two were enclosed by George’s weakness, and by his father’s inability to learn from others what the boy was not yet able to tell him, gave a strange remoteness to everything but the things which count in an infant’s world: food, warmth, sleep. Campton’s nearest approach to reality was his daily scrutiny of the temperature-chart. He studied it as he used to study the communiques which he now no longer even thought of.

  Sometimes when George was asleep Campton would sit pondering on the days at Doullens. There was an exquisite joy in silently building up, on that foundation of darkness and anguish, the walls of peace that now surrounded him, a structure so transparent that one could peer through it at the routed Furies, yet so impenetrable that he sat there in a kind of god-like aloofness. For one thing he was especially thankful—and that was the conclusion of his unseemly wrangle with Mr. Brant; thankful that, almost at once, he had hurried after the banker, caught up with him, and stammered out, clutching his hand: “I know—I know how you feel.”

  Mr. Brant’s reactions were never rapid, and the events of the preceding days had called upon faculties that were almost atrophied. He had merely looked at Campton in mute distress, returned his pressure, and silently remounted the hospital stairs with him.

  Campton hated himself for his ill-temper, but was glad, even at the time, that no interested motive had prompted his apology. He should have hated himself even more if he had asked the banker’s pardon because of Mr. Brant’s “pull,” and the uses to which it might be put; or even if he had associated his excuses with any past motives of gratitude, such as the fact that but for Mr. Brant he might never have reached George’s side. Instead of that, he simply felt that once more his senseless violence had got the better of him, and he was sorry that he had behaved like a brute to a man who loved George, and was suffering almost as much as he was at the thought that George might die…

  After that episode, and Campton’s apology, the relations of the two men became so easy that each gradually came to take the other for granted; and Mr. Brant, relieved of a perpetual hostile scrutiny, was free to exercise his ingenuity in planning and managing. It was owing to him—Campton no longer minded admitting it—that the famous surgeon had hastened his return to Doullens, that George’s translation to the sweet monastic building near the sea had been so rapidly effected, and that the great man, appearing there soon afterward, had extracted the bullet with his own hand. But for Mr. Brant’s persistence even the leave to bring one of Mrs. Brant’s motor-ambulances to Doullens would never have been given; and it might have been fatal to George to make the journey in a slow and jolting military train. But for Mr. Brant, again, he would have been sent to a crowded military hospital instead of being brought to this white heaven of rest. “And all that just because I overtook him in time to prevent his jumping into his motor and going back to Paris in order to get out of my way!” Campton, at the thought, lowered his spirit into new depths of contrition.

  George, who had been asleep, opened his eyes and looked at his father.

  “Where’s Uncle Andy?”

  “Gone to Paris to get your mother.”

  “Yes. Of course. He told me”

  George smiled, and withdrew once more into his secret world.

  But Campton’s state of mind was less happy. As the time of Julia’s arrival approached he began to ask himself with increasing apprehension how she would fit into the situation. Mr. Brant had fitted into it—perfectly. Campton had actually begun to feel a secret dependence on him, a fidgety uneasiness since he had left for Paris, sweet though it was to be alone with George. But Julia—what might she not do and say to unsettle things, break the spell, agitate and unnerve them all? Campton did not question her love for her son; but he was not sure what form it would take in conditions to which she was so unsuited. How could she ever penetrate into the mystery of peace which enclosed him and his boy? And if she felt them thus mysteriously shut off would she not dimly resent her exclusion? If only Adele Anthony had been coming too! Campton had urged Mr. Brant to bring her; but the banker had failed to obtain a permit for any one but the boy’s mother. He had even found it difficult to get his own leave renewed; it was only after a first trip to Paris, and repeated efforts at the War Office, that he had been allowed to go to Paris and fetch his wife, who was just arriving from Biarritz.

  Well—for the moment, at any rate, Campton had the boy to himself. As he sat there, trying to picture the gradual resurrection of George’s pre-war face out of the delicately pencilled white mask on the pillow, he noted the curious change of planes produced by suffering and emaciation, and the altered relation of lights and shadows. Materially speaking, the new George looked like the old one seen in the bowl of a spoon, and through blue spectacles: peaked, narrow, livid, with elongated nose and sunken eye-sockets. But these altered proportions were not what had really changed him. There was something in the curve of the mouth that fever and emaciation could not account for. In that new line, and in the look of his eyes—the look travelling slowly outward through a long blue tunnel, like some mysterious creature rising from the depths of the sea—that was where the new George lurked, the George to be watched and lain in wait for, patiently and slowly puzzled out…

  He reopened his eyes.

  “Adele too?”

  Campton had learned to bridge over the spaced between the questions. “No; not this time. We tried, but it couldn’t be managed. A little later, I hope”

  “She’s all right?”

  “Rather! Blooming.”

  “And Boylston?”

  “Blooming too.”

  George’s lids closed contentedly, like doors shutting him away from the world.

  It was the first time since his operation that he had asked about any of his friends, or had appeared to think they might come to see him. But his mind, like his stomach, could receive very little nutriment at a time; he liked to have one mouthful given to him, and then to lie ruminating it in the lengthening intervals between his attacks of pain.

  Each time he asked for news of any one his father wondered what name would next come to his lips. Even during his delirium he had mentioned no one but his parents, Mr. Brant, Adele Anthony and Boylston; yet it was not possible, Campton thought, that these formed the circumference of his life, that some contracted fold of memory did not hold a nearer image, a more secret name… The father’s heart beat faster, half from curiosity, half from a kind of shy delicacy, at the thought that at any moment that name might wake in George and utter itself.

  Campton’s thoughts again turned to his wife. With Julia there was never any knowing. Ten to one she would send the boy’s temperature up. He was thankful that, owing to the difficulty of getting the news to her, and then of bringing her back from a frontier department, so many days had had to elapse.

  But when she arrived, nothing, after all, happened as he had expected. She had put on her nurse’s dress for the journey (he thought it rather theatrical of her, till he remembered how much easier it was to get about in any sort of uniform); but there was not a trace of coquetry in her appearance. As a frame for her haggard unpowdered face the white coif look harsh and unbecoming; she reminded him, as she got out of the motor, of some mortified Jansenist nun from one of Philippe de Champaigne’s canvases.

  Campton led her to George’s door, but left her there; she did not appear to notice whether or not he was following her. He whispered: “Careful about his temperature; he’s very weak,” and she bent her profile silently as she went in.

  

  XXVII.

  George, that evening, seemed rather better, and his temperature had not gone up: Campton had to repress a movement of jealousy at Julia’s having done her son no harm. Her experience as a nurse, disci
plining a vague gift for the sickroom, had developed in her the faculty of self-command: before the war, if George had met with a dangerous accident, she would have been more encumbering than helpful.

  Campton had to admit the change, but it did not draw them any nearer. Her manner of loving their son was too different. Nowadays, when he and Anderson Brant were together, he felt that they were thinking of the same things in the same way; but Julia’s face, even aged and humanized by grief, was still a mere mask to him. He could never tell what form her thoughts about George might be taking.

  Mr. Brant, on his wife’s arrival, had judged it discreet to efface himself. Campton hunted for him in vain in the park, and under the cloister; he remained invisible till they met at the early dinner which they shared with the staff. But the meal did not last long, and when it was over, and nurses and doctors scattered, Mr. Brant again slipped away, leaving his wife and Campton alone.

  Campton glanced after him, surprised. “Why does he go?”

  Mrs. Brant pursed her lips, evidently as much surprised by his question as he by her husband’s withdrawal.

  “I suppose he’s going to bed—to be ready for his early start tomorrow.”

  “A start?”

  She stared. “He’s going back to Paris.”

  Campton was genuinely astonished. “Is he? I’m sorry.”

  “Oh” She seemed unprepared for this. “After all, you must see—we can’t very well… all three of us … especially with these nuns…”

  “Oh, if it’s only that”

  She did not take this up, and one of their usual silences followed. Campton was thinking that it was all nonsense about the nuns, and meditating on the advisability of going in pursuit of Mr. Brant to tell him so. He dreaded the prospect of a long succession of days alone between George and George’s mother.

  Mrs. Brant spoke again. “I was sorry to find that the Sisters have been kept on here. Are they much with George?”