Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  George’s birthday party had been given up on account of young Dastrey’s death. Mrs. Brant evidently thought the postponement unnecessary; since George’s return she had gone over heart and soul to the “business as usual” party. But Mr. Brant quietly sided with George; and Campton was glad to be spared the necessity of celebrating the day in such a setting.

  It was some time since Campton had seen his son; but the fault was not his son’s. The painter was aware of having voluntarily avoided George. He said to himself: “As long as I know he’s safe why should I bother him?” But in reality he did not feel himself to be fit company for any one, and had even shunned poor Paul Dastrey on the latter’s hurried passage through Paris, when he had come back from carrying the fatal news to young Dastrey’s mother.

  “What on earth could Paul and I have found to say to each other?” Campton argued with himself. “For men of our age there’s nothing left to say nowadays. The only thing I can do is to try to work up one of my old studies of Louis. That might please him a little—later on.”

  But after one or two attempts he pushed away that canvas too.

  At length one afternoon George came in. They had not met for over a week, and as George’s blue uniform detached itself against the blurred tapestries of the studio, the north light modelling the fresh curves of his face, the father’s heart gave a leap of pride. His son had never seemed to him so young and strong and vivid.

  George, with a sudden blush, took his hand in a long pressure.

  “I say, Dad—Madge has told me. Told me that you know about us and that you’ve persuaded her to see things as I do. She hadn’t had a chance to speak to me of your visit till last night.”

  Campton felt his colour rising; but though his own part in the business still embarrassed him he was glad that the barriers were down.

  “I didn’t want,” George continued, still flushed and slightly constrained, “to say anything to you about all this till I could say: ‘Here’s my wife.’ And now she’s promised.”

  “She’s promised?”

  “Thanks to you, you know. Your visit to her did it. She told me the whole thing yesterday. How she’d come here in desperation, to ask you to help her, to have her mind cleared up for her; and how you’d thought it all over, and then gone to see her, and how wise and perfect you’d been about it all. Poor child—if you knew the difference it’s made to her!”

  They were seated now, the littered table between them. Campton, his elbows on it, his chin on his hands, looked across at his son, who faced the light.

  “The difference to you too?” he questioned.

  George smiled: it was exactly the same detached smile which he used to shed on the little nurse who brought him his cocoa.

  “Of course. Now I can go back without worrying.” He let the words fall as carelessly as if there were nothing in them to challenge attention.

  “Go back?” Campton stared at him with a blank countenance. Had he heard aright? The noise of a passing lorry suddenly roared in his ears like the guns of the front.

  “Did you say: go back?”

  George opened his blue eyes wide. “Why, of course; as soon as ever I’m patched up. You didn’t think?”

  “I thought you had the sense to realize that you’ve done your share in one line, and that your business now is to do it in another.”

  The same detached smile again brushed George’s lips. “But if I happen to have only one line?”

  “Nonsense! You know they don’t think that at the War Office.”

  “I don’t believe the War Office will shut down if I leave it.”

  “What an argument! It sounds like” Campton, breaking off on a sharp breath, closed his lids for a second. He had been gazing too steadily into George’s eyes, and now at last he knew what that mysterious look in them meant. It was Benny Upsher’s look, of course—inaccessible to reason, beyond reason, belonging to other spaces, other weights and measures, over the edge, somehow, of the tangible calculable world…

  “A man can’t do more than his duty: you’ve done that,” he growled.

  But George insisted with his gentle obstinacy: “You’ll feel differently about it when America comes in.”

  Campton shook his head. “Never about your case.”

  “You will—when you see how we all feel. When we’re all in it you wouldn’t have me looking on, would you? And then there are my men—I’ve got to get back to my men.”

  “But you’ve no right to go now; no business,” his father broke in violently. “Persuading that poor girl to wreck her life … and then leaving her, planting her there with her past ruined, and her future … George, you can’t!”

  George, in his long months of illness, had lost his old ruddiness of complexion. At his father’s challenge the blood again rose the more visibly to his still-gaunt cheeks and white forehead: he was evidently struck.

  “You’ll kill her—and kill your mother!” Campton stormed.

  “Oh, it’s not for tomorrow. Not for a long time, perhaps. My shoulder’s still too stiff. I was stupid,” the young man haltingly added, “to put it as I did. Of course I’ve got to think of Madge now,” he acknowledged, “as well as mother.”

  The blood flowed slowly back to Campton’s heart. “You’ve got to think of—just the mere common-sense of the thing. That’s all I ask. You’ve done your turn; you’ve done more. But never mind that. Now it’s different. You’re barely patched up: you’re of use, immense use, for staff-work, and you know it. And you’ve asked a woman to tie up her future to yours—at what cost you know too. It’s as much your duty to keep away from the front now as it was before—well, I admit it—to go there. You’ve done just what I should have wanted my son to do, up to this minute”

  George laid a hand on his a little wistfully. “Then just go on trusting me.”

  “I do—to see that I’m right! If I can’t convince you, ask Boylston—ask Adele!”

  George sat staring down at the table. For the first time since they had met at Doullens Campton was conscious of reaching his son’s inner mind, and of influencing it.

  “I wonder if you really love her?” he suddenly risked.

  The question did not seem to offend George, scarcely to surprise him. “Of course,” he said simply. “Only—well, everything’s different nowadays, isn’t it? So many of the old ideas have come to seem such humbug. That’s what I want to drag her out of—the coils and coils of stale humbug. They were killing her.”

  “Well—take care you don’t,” Campton said, thinking that everything was different indeed, as he recalled the reasons young men had had for loving and marrying in his own time.

  A faint look of amusement came into George’s eyes. “Kill her? Oh, no. I’m gradually bringing her to life. But all this is hard to talk about—yet. By-and-bye you’ll understand; she’ll show you, we’ll show you together. But at present nothing’s to be said—to any one, please, not even to mother. Madge thinks this is no time for such things. There, of course, I don’t agree; but I must be patient. The secrecy, the underhandedness, are hateful to me; but for her it’s all a part of the sacred humbug.”

  He rose listlessly, as if the discussion had bled all the life out of him, and took himself away.

  When he had gone his father drew a deep breath. Yes—the boy would stay in Paris; he would almost certainly stay; for the present, at any rate. And people were still prophesying that in the spring there would be a big push all along the line; and after that the nightmare might be over. Campton was glad he had gone to see Madge Talkett. He was glad, above all, that if the thing had to be done it was over, and that, by Madge’s wish, no one was to know of what had passed between them. It was a distinct relief, in spite of what he had suggested to George, not to have to carry that particular problem to Adele Anthony or Boylston.

  A few days late George accepted a staff-appointment in Paris.

  

  Book IV.

  XXXII.

  Heavily the weeks wen
t by.

  The world continued to roar on through smoke and flame, and contrasted with that headlong race was the slow dragging lapse of hours and days to those who had to wait on events inactively.

  When Campton met Paul Dastrey for the first time after the death of the latter’s nephew, the two men exchanged a long hand-clasp and then sat silent. As Campton had felt from the first, there was nothing left for them to say to each other. If young men like Louis Dastrey must continue to be sacrificed by hundreds of thousands to save their country, for whom was the country being saved? Was it for the wasp-waisted youths in sham uniforms who hunted the reawakening hotels and restaurants, in the frequent intervals between their ambulance trips to safe distances from the front? Or for the elderly men like Dastrey and Campton, who could only sit facing each other with the spectre of the lost between them? Young Dastrey, young Fortin-Lescluze, Rene Davril, Benny Upsher—and how many hundreds more each day! And not even a child left by most of them to carry on the faith they had died for…

  “If we’re giving all we care for so that those little worms can reopen their dance-halls on the ruins, what in God’s name is left?” Campton questioned.

  Dastrey sat looking at the ground, his grey head bent between his hands. “France,” he said.

  “What’s France, with no men left?”

  “Well—I suppose, an Idea.”

  “Yes. I suppose so.” Campton stood up heavily.

  An Idea: they must cling to that. If Dastrey, from the depths of his destitution, could still feel it and live by it, why did it not help Campton more? An Idea: that was what France, ever since she had existed, had always been in the story of civilization; a luminous point about which striving visions and purposes could rally. And in that sense she had been as much Campton’s spiritual home as Dastrey’s; to thinkers, artists, to all creators, she had always been a second country. If France went, western civilization went with her; and then all they had believed in and been guided by would perish. That was what George had felt; it was what had driven him from the Argonne to the Aisne. Campton felt it too; but dully, through a fog. His son was safe; yes—but too many other men’s sons were dying. There was no spot where his thoughts could rest: there were moments when the sight of George, intact and immaculate—his arm at last out of its sling—rose before his father like a reproach.

  The feeling was senseless; but there it was. Whenever the young man entered the room Campton saw him attended by the invisible host of his comrades, the fevered, the maimed and the dying. The Germans had attacked at Verdun: horrible daily details of the struggle were pouring in. No one at the rear had really known, except in swift fitful flashes, about the individual suffering of the first months of the war; now such information was systematized and distributed everywhere, daily, with a cold impartial hand. And every night, when one laid one’s old bones on one’s bed, there were those others, the young in their thousands, lying down, perhaps never to rise again, in the mud and blood of the trenches.

  Even Boylston’s Preparedness was beginning to get on Campton’s nerves. He tried to picture to himself how he should exult when his country at last fell into line; but he could realize only what his humiliation would be if she did not. It was almost a relief, at this time, to have his mind diverted to the dissensions among “The Friends of French Art,” where, at a stormy meeting, Harvey Mayhew, as a member of the Finance Committee, had asked for an account of the money taken in at Mrs. Talkett’s concert. This money, Mr. Mayhew stated, had passed through a number of hands. It should have been taken over by Mr. Boylston, as treasurer, at the close of the performance; but he had failed to claim it—had, in fact, been unfindable when the organizers of the concert brought their takings to Mrs. Talkett—and the money, knocking about from hand to hand, had finally been carried by Mrs. Talkett herself to Mr. Campton. The latter, when asked to entrust it to Mr. Mayhew, had refused on the ground that he had already deposited it in the bank; but a number of days later it was known to be still in his possession. All this time Mr. Boylston, treasurer, and chairman of the Financial Committee, appeared to think it quite in order that the funds should have been (as he assumed) deposited in the bank by a member who was not on that particular committee, and who, in reality, had forgotten that they were in his possession.

  Mr. Mayhew delivered himself of this indictment amid an embarrassed silence. To Campton it had seemed as if a burst of protest must instantly clear the air. But after he himself had apologized for this negligence in not depositing the money, and Boylston had disengaged his responsibility in a few quiet words, there followed another blank interval. Then Mr. Mayhew suddenly suggested a complete reorganization of the work. He had something to criticize in every department. He, who so seldom showed himself at the office, now presented a list of omissions and commissions against which one after another of the active members rose to enter a mild denial. It was clear that some one belonging to the organization, and who was playing into his hands, had provided him with a series of cleverly falsified charges against the whole group of workers.

  Presently Campton could stand it no longer, and, jumping up, suddenly articulate, he flung into his cousin’s face a handful of home-truths under which he expected that glossy countenance to lost its lustre. But Mr. Mayhew bore the assault with urbanity. It did not behove him, he said, to take up the reproaches addressed to him by the most distinguished member of their committee—the most distinguished, he might surely say without offence to any of the others (a murmur of assent); it did not behove him, because one of the few occasions on which a great artist may be said to be at a disadvantage is when he is trying to discuss business matters with a man of business. He, Mr. Mayhew, was only that, nothing more; but he was that, and he had been trained to answer random abuse by hard facts. In no way did he intend to reflect on the devoted labours of certain ladies of the committee, nor on their sympathetic treasurer’s gallant efforts to acquire, amid all his other pressing interests, the rudiments of business habits; but Miss Anthony had all along been dividing her time between two widely different charities, and Mr. Boylston, like his distinguished champion, was first of all an artist, with the habits of the studio rather than of the office. In the circumstances Campton jumped to his feet again. If he stayed a moment longer he felt he should knock Mayhew down. He jammed his hat on, shouted out “I resign,” and limped out of the room.

  It was the way in which his encounters with practical difficulties always ended. The consciousness of his inferiority in argument, the visionary’s bewilderment when incomprehensible facts are thrust on him by fluent people, the helpless sense of not knowing what to answer, and of seeing his dream-world smashed in the rough-and-tumble of shabby motives—it all gave him the feeling that he was drowning, and must fight his way to the surface before they had him under.

  In the street he stood in a cold sweat of remorse. He knew the charges of negligence against Miss Anthony and Boylston were trumped up. He knew there was an answer to be made, and that he was the man to make it; and his eyes filled with tears of rage and self-pity at his own incompetence. But then he took heart at the thought of Boylston’s astuteness and Miss Anthony’s courage. They would not let themselves be beaten—probably they would fight their battle better without him. He tried to protect his retreat with such arguments, and when he got back to the studio he called up Mme. Lebel, and plunged again into his charcoal study of her head. He did not remember having ever worked with such supernatural felicity: it was as if that were his victorious answer to all their lies and intrigues…

  But the Mayhew party was victorious too. How it came about a mind like Campton’s could not grasp. Mr. Mayhew, it appeared, had let fall that a very large gift of money from the world-renowned philanthropist, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein (obtained through the good offices of Mmes. de Dolmetsch and Beausite) was contingent on certain immediate changes in the organization (“drastic changes” was Mr. Mayhew’s phrase); and thereupon several hitherto passive members had suddenly found voice to ass
ert the duty of not losing this gift. After that the way was clear. Adele Anthony and Boylston were offered ornamental posts which they declined, and within a week the Palais Royal saw them no more, and Paris drawing-rooms echoed with the usual rumours of committee wrangles and dark discoveries.

  The episode left Campton with a bitter taste in his soul. It seemed to him like an ugly little allegory of Germany’s manoeuvring the world into war. The speciousness of Mr. Mayhew’s arguments, the sleight-of-hand by which he had dislodged the real workers and replaced them by his satellites, reminded the painter of the neutrals who were beginning to say that there were two sides to every question, that war was always cruel, and how about the Russian atrocities in Silesia? As the month dragged on a breath of luke-warmness had begun to blow through the world, damping men’s souls, confusing plain issues, casting a doubt on the worth of everything. People were beginning to ask what one knew, after all, of the secret motives which had impelled half-a-dozen self-indulgent old men ensconced in Ministerial offices to plunge the world in ruin. No one seemed to feel any longer that life is something more than being alive; apparently the only people not tired of the thought of death were the young men still pouring out to it in their thousands.

  Still those thousands poured; still the young died; still, wherever Campton went, he met elderly faces, known and unknown, disfigured by grief, shrunken with renunciation. And still the months wore on without result.

  One day in crossing the Tuileries he felt the same soft sparkle which, just about a year earlier, had abruptly stirred the sap in him. Yes—it was nearly a year since the day when he had noticed the first horse-chestnut blossoms, and been reminded by Mme. Lebel that he ought to buy some new shirts; and though today the horse-chestnuts were still leafless they were already misty with buds, and the tall white clouds above them full-uddered with spring showers. It was spring again, spring with her deluding promises—her gilding of worn stones and chilly water, the mystery of her distances, the finish and brilliance of her nearer strokes. Campton, in spite of himself, drank down the life-giving draught and felt its murmur in his veins. And just then, across the width of the gardens he saw, beyond a stretch of turf and clipped shrubs, two people, also motionless, who seemed to have the same cup at their lips. He recognized his son and Mrs. Talkett.