Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  “The Sisters? I don’t know. The upper nurses are Red Cross, as you saw. But of course the others are about a good deal. What’s wrong? They seem to me perfect.”

  She hesitated and coloured a little. “I don’t want them to find out—about the Extreme Unction,” she finally said.

  Campton repeated her words blankly. He began to think that anxiety and fatigue had confused her mind.

  She coloured more deeply. “Oh, I forgot—you don’t know. I couldn’t think of anything but George at first … and the whole thing is so painful to me… Where’s my bag?”

  She groped for her reticule, found it in the folds of the cloak she had kept about her shoulders, and fumbled in it with wrinkled jewelled fingers.

  “Anderson hasn’t spoken to you, then—spoken about Mrs. Talkett?” she asked suddenly.

  “About Mrs. Talkett? Why should he? What on earth has happened?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t see her myself … I couldn’t … so he had to. She had to be thanked, of course … but it seems to me so dreadful, so very dreadful… our boy… that woman…”

  Campton did not press her further. He sat dumbfounded, trying to take in what she was so obviously trying to communicate, and yet instinctively resisting the approach of the revelation he foresaw.

  “George—Mrs. Talkett?” He forced himself to couple the two names, unnatural as their union seemed.

  “I supposed you knew. Isn’t it dreadful? A woman old enough”

  She drew a letter from her bag.

  He interrupted her. “Is that letter what you want to show me?”

  “Yes. She insisted on Anderson’s keeping it—for you. She said it belonged to us, I believe… It seems there was a promise—made the night before he was mobilised—that if anything happened he would get word to her… No thought of us!” She began to whimper.

  Campton reached out for the letter. Mrs. Talkett—Madge Talkett and George! That was where the boy had gone then, that last night when his father, left alone at the Crillon, had been so hurt by his desertion! That was the name which, in his hours of vigil in the little white room, Campton had watched for on his son’s lips, the name which, one day, sooner or later, he would have to hear them pronounce… How little he had thought, as he sat studying the mysterious beauty of George’s face, what a commonplace secret it concealed!

  The writing was not George’s, but that of an unlettered French soldier. Campton, glancing at the signature, recalled it as that of his son’s orderly, who had been slightly wounded in the same attack as George, and sent for twenty-four hours to the same hospital at Doullens. He had been at George’s side when he fell, and with the simple directness often natural to his class in France he told the tale of his lieutenant’s wounding, in circumstances which appeared to have given George great glory in the eyes of his men. They thought the wound mortal; but the orderly and a stretcher-bearer had managed to get the young man into the shelter of a little wood. The stretcher-bearer, it turned out, was a priest. He had at once applied the consecrated oil, and George, still conscious, had received it “with a beautiful smile”; then the orderly, thinking all was over, had hurried back to the fighting, and been wounded. The next day he too had been carried to Doullens; and there, after many enquiries, he had found his lieutenant in the same hospital, alive, but too ill to see him.

  He had contrived, however, to see the nurse, and had learned from her that the doctors had not given up hope. With that he had to be content; but before returning to his base he had hastened to fulfill his lieutenant’s instructions (given “many months earlier”) by writing to tell “his lady” that he was severely wounded, but still alive—”which is a good deal in itself,” the orderly hopefully ended, “not to mention his receiving the Legion of Honour.”

  Campton laid the letter down. There was too much to be taken in all at once; and, as usual in moments of deep disturbance, he wanted to be alone, above all wanted to be away from Julia. But Julia held him with insistent eyes.

  “Do you want this?” he asked finally, pushing the letter toward her.

  She recoiled. “Want it? A letter written to that woman? No! I should have returned it at once—but Anderson wouldn’t let me… Think of her forcing herself upon me as she did—and making you paint her portrait! I see it all now. Had you any idea this was going on?”

  Campton shook his head, and perceived by her look of relief that what she had resented above all was the thought of his being in a secret of George’s from which she herself was excluded.

  “Adele didn’t know either,” she said, with evident satisfaction. Campton remembered that he had been struck by Miss Anthony’s look of sincerity when he had asked her if she had any idea where George had spent his last evening, and she had answered negatively. This recollection made him understand Mrs. Brant’s feeling of relief.

  “Perhaps, after all, it’s only a flirtation—a mere sentimental friendship,” he hazarded.

  “A flirtation?” Mrs. Brant’s Mater Dolorosa face suddenly sharpened to worldly astuteness. “A sentimental friendship? Have you ever heard George mention her name—or make any sort of allusion to such a friendship?”

  Campton considered. “No. I don’t remember his ever speaking of her.”

  “Well, then” Her eyes had the irritated look he had seen on the far-off day when he had thrown Beausite’s dinner invitation into the fire. Once more, they seemed to say, she had taken the measure of his worldly wisdom.

  George’s silence—his care not even to mention that the Talketts were so much as known to him—certainly made it look as though the matter went deep with him. Campton, recalling the tone of the Talkett drawing-room and its familiars, had an even stronger recoil of indignation than Julia’s; but he was silenced by a dread of tampering with his son’s privacy, a sense of the sacredness of everything pertaining to that still-mysterious figure in the white bed upstairs.

  Mrs. Brant’s face had clouded again. “It’s all so dreadful—and this Extreme Unction too! What is it exactly, do you know? A sort of baptism? Will the Roman Church try to get hold of him on the strength of it?”

  Campton remembered with a faint inward amusement that, in spite of her foreign bringing-up, and all her continental affinities, Julia had remained as implacably and incuriously Protestant as if all her life she had heard the Scarlet Woman denounced from Presbyterian pulpits. At another time it would have amused him to ponder on this one streak in her of the ancestral iron; but now he wanted only to console her.

  “Oh, no—it was just the accident of the priest’s being there. One of our chaplains would have done the same kind of thing.”

  She looked at him mistrustfully. “The same kind of thing? It’s never the same with them! Whatever they do reaches ahead. I’ve seen such advantage taken of the wounded when they were too weak to resist … didn’t know what they were saying or doing…” Her eyes filled with tears. “A priest and a woman—I feel as if I’d lost my boy!”

  The words went through Campton like a sword, and he sprang to his feet. “Oh, for God’s sake be quiet—don’t say it! What does anything matter but that he’s alive?”

  “Of course, of course… I didn’t mean … But that he should have deceived us … about everything … everything…”

  “Ah, don’t say that either! Don’t tempt Providence! If he deceived us, as you call it, we’ve no one but ourselves to blame; you and I, and—well, and Brant. Didn’t we all do our best to make him deceive us—with our intriguing and our wire-pulling and our cowardice? How he despised us for it—yes, thank God, how he despised us from the first! He didn’t hide the truth from Boylston or Adele, because they were the only two on a level with him. And they knew why he’d deceived us; they understood him, they abetted him from the first.” He stopped, checked by Mrs. Brant’s pale bewildered face, and the eyes imploringly lifted, as if to ward off unintelligible words.

  “Ah, well, all this is no use,” he said; “we’ve got him safe, and it’s more than we deserve.” He la
id his hand on her shoulder. “Go to bed; you’re dead-beat. Only don’t say things—things that might wake up the Furies…”

  He pocketed the letter and went out in search of Mr. Brant, followed by her gaze of perplexity.

  The latter was smoking a last cigar as he paced up and down the cloister with upturned coat-collar. Silence lay on the carefully darkened building, crouching low under an icy sea-fog; at intervals, through the hush, the waves continued to mimic the booming of the guns.

  Campton drew out the orderly’s letter. “I hear you’re leaving tomorrow early, and I suppose I’d better give this back,” he said.

  Mr. Brant had evidently expected him. “Oh, thanks. But Mrs. Talkett says she has no right to it.”

  “No right to it? That’s a queer thing to say.”

  “So I thought. I suppose she meant, till you’d seen it. She was dreadfully upset… till she saw me she’d supposed he was dead.”

  Campton shivered. “She sent this to your house?”

  “Yes; the moment she got it. It was waiting there when my—when Julia arrived.”

  “And you went to thank her?”

  “Yes.” Mr. Brant hesitated. “Julia disliked to keep the letter. And I thought it only proper to take it back myself.”

  “Certainly. And—what was your impression?”

  Mr. Brant hesitated again. He had already, Campton felt, reached the utmost limit of his power of communicativeness. It was against all his habits to “commit himself.” Finally he said, in an unsteady voice: “It was impossible not to feel sorry for her.”

  “Did she say—er—anything special? Anything about herself and”

  “No; not a word. She was—well, all broken up, as they say.”

  “Poor thing!” Campton murmured.

  “Yes—oh, yes!” Mr. Brant held the letter, turning it thoughtfully about. “It’s a great thing,” he began abruptly, as if the words were beyond his control, “to have such a beautiful account of the affair. George himself, of course, would never”

  “No, never.” Campton considered. “You must take it back to her, naturally. But I should like to have a copy first.”

  Mr. Brant put a hand in his pocket. “I supposed you would. And I took the liberty of making two—oh, privately, of course. I hope you’ll find my writing fairly legible.” He drew two folded sheets from his note-case, and offered one to Campton.

  “Oh, thank you.” The two men grasped hands through the fog.

  Mr. Brant turned to continue his round, and Campton went up to the white-washed cell in which he was lodged. Screening his candle to keep the least light from leaking through the shutters, he re-read the story of George’s wounding, copied out in the cramped tremulous writing of a man who never took pen in hand but to sign a daily batch of typed letters. The “hand-made” copy of a letter by Mr. Brant represented something like the pious toil expended by a monkish scribe on the page of a missal; and Campton was moved by the little man’s devotion.

  As for the letter, Campton had no sooner begun to re-read it than he entirely forgot that it was a message of love, addressed at George’s request to Mrs. Talkett, and saw in it only the record of his son’s bravery. And for the first time he understood that from the moment of George’s wounding until now he had never really thought of him in relation to the war, never thought of his judgment on the war, of all the unknown emotions, resolves and actions which had drawn him so many months ago from his safe shelter in the Argonne.

  These things Campton, unconsciously, had put out of his mind, or rather had lost out of his mind, from the moment when he had heard of George’s bodily presence, with the physical signs of him, his weakness, his temperature, the pain in his arm, the oppression on his lung, all the daily insistent details involved in coaxing him slowly back to life.

  The father could bear no more; he put the letter away, as a man might put away something of which his heart was too full to measure it. Later—yes; now, all he knew was that his son was alive.

  But the hour of Campton’s entering into glory came when, two or three days later, George asked with sudden smile: “When I exchanged regiments I did what you’d always hoped I would, eh, Dad?”

  It was the first allusion, on the part of either, to the mystery of George’s transit from the Argonne to the front. At Doullens he had been too weak to be questioned, and as he grew stronger, and entered upon the successive stages of his convalescence, he gave the impression of having travelled far beyond such matters, and of living his real life in some inconceivable region from which, with that new smile of his, he continued to look down unseeingly on his parents. “It’s exactly as if he were dead,” the father thought. “And if he were, he might go on watching us with just such a smile.”

  And then one morning as they were taking a few steps on a sunny terrace, Campton had felt the pressure of the boy’s sound arm, and caught the old George in his look.

  “I… good Lord … at any rate I’m glad you felt sure of me,” Campton could only stammer in reply.

  George laughed. “Well—rather!”

  There was a long silence full of sea-murmurs, too drowsy and indolent, for once, to simulate the horror of the guns.

  “I—I only wish you’d felt you could trust me about it from the first, as you did Adele and Boylston,” the father continued.

  “But, my dear fellow, I did feel it! I swear I did! Only, you see, there was mother. I thought it all over, and decided it would be easier for you both if I said nothing. And, after all, I’m glad now that I didn’t—that is, if you really do understand.”

  “Yes; I understand.”

  “That’s jolly.” George’s eyes turned from his and rested with a joyful gravity on the little round-faced Sister who hurried up to say that he’d been out long enough. Campton often caught him fixing this look of serene benevolence on the people who were gradually repeopling his world, a look which seemed to say that they were new to him, yet dimly familiar. He was like a traveller returning after incommunicable adventures to the place where he had lived as a child; and, as happens with such wanderers, the trivial and insignificant things, the things a newcomer would not have noticed, seemed often to interest him most of all.

  He said nothing more about himself, but with the look of recovered humanness which made him more lovable if less remotely beautiful, began to question his father.

  “Boylston wrote that you’d begun to paint again. I’m glad.”

  “Oh, I only took it up for a while last spring.”

  “Portraits?”

  “A few. But I chucked it. I couldn’t stand the atmosphere.”

  “What atmosphere?”

  “Of people who could want to be painted at such a time. People who wanted to ‘secure a Campton.’ Oh, and then the dealers—God!”

  George seemed unimpressed. “After all, life’s got to go on.”

  “Yes—that’s what they say! And the only result is to make me doubt if theirs has.”

  His son laughed, and then threw off: ‘You did Mrs. Talkett?”

  ‘Yes,” Campton snapped, off his guard.

  “She’s a pretty creature,” said George; and at that moment his eyes, resting again on the little nurse, who was waiting at his door with a cup of cocoa, lit up with celestial gratitude.

  “The communique’s good today,” she cried; and he smiled at her boyishly. The war was beginning to interest him again: Campton was sure that every moment he could spare from that unimaginable region which his blue eyes guarded like a sword was spent among his comrades at the front.

  As the day approached for the return to Paris, Campton began to penetrate more deeply into the meaning of George’s remoteness. He himself, he discovered, had been all unawares in a far country, a country guarded by a winged sentry, as the old hymn had it: the region of silent incessant communion with his son. Just they two: everything else effaced; not discarded, destroyed, not disregarded even, but blotted out by a soft silver haze, as the brown slopes and distances were, on cert
ain days, from the windows of the seaward-gazing hospital.

  It was not that Campton had been unconscious of the presence of other suffering about them. As George grew stronger, and took his first steps in the wards, he and his father were inevitably brought into contact with the life of the hospital. George had even found a few friends, and two or three regimental comrades, among the officers perpetually coming and going, or enduring the long weeks of agony which led up to the end. But that was only toward the close of their sojourn, when George was about to yield his place to others, and be taken to Paris for the re-education of his shattered arm. And by that time the weeks of solitary communion had left such an imprint on Campton that, once the hospital was behind him, and no more than a phase of memory, it became to him as one of its own sea-mists, in which he and his son might have been peacefully shut away together from all the rest of the world.

  

  XXVIII.

  “Preparedness!” cried Boylston in an exultant crow.

  His round brown face with its curly crest and peering half-blind eyes beamed at Campton in the old way across the desk of the Palais Royal office; and from the corner where she had sunk down on one of the broken-springed divans, Adele Anthony echoed: “Preparedness!”

  It was the first time that Campton had heard the word; but the sense of it had been in the air ever since he and George had got back to Paris. He remembered, on the very day of their arrival, noticing something different in both Boylston and Miss Anthony; and the change had shown itself in the same ways: both seemed more vivid yet more remote. It had struck Campton in the moment of first meeting them, in the Paris hospital near the Bois de Boulogne—Fortin-Lescluze’s old Nursing-Home transformed into a House of Re-education—to which George had been taken. In the little cell crowded with flowers—almost too many flowers, his father thought, for the patient’s aching head and tired eyes—Campton, watching the entrance of the two visitors, the first to be admitted after Julia and Mr. Brant, had instantly remarked the air they had of sharing something so secret and important that their joy at seeing George seemed only the overflow of another deeper joy.