Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  Their backs were toward him, and they stood close together, looking with the same eyes at the same sight: an Apollo touched with flying sunlight. After a while they walked on again, slowly and close to each other. George, as they moved, seemed now and then to point out some beauty of sculpture, or the colour of a lichened urn; and once they turned and took their fill of the great perspective tapering to the Arch—the Arch on which Rude’s Maenad-Marseillaise still yelled her battalions on to death.

  

  XXXIII.

  Campton finished his charcoal of Mme. Lebel; then attacked her in oils. Now that his work at the Palais Royal was ended, painting was once more his only refuge.

  Adele Anthony had returned to her refugees; Boylston, pale and obstinate, toiled on at Preparedness. But Campton found it impossible to take up any new form of work; his philanthropic ardour was exhausted. He could only shut himself up, for long solitary hours, in the empty and echoing temple of his art.

  George emphatically approved of his course: George was as insistent as Mrs. Brant on the duty of “business as usual.” But on the young man’s lips the phrase had a different meaning; it seemed the result of that altered perspective which Campton was conscious of whenever, nowadays, he tried to see things as his son saw them. George was not indifferent, he was not callous; but he seemed to feel himself mysteriously set apart, destined to some other task for which he was passively waiting. Even the split among “The Friends of French Art” left him, despite his admiration for Boylston, curiously unperturbed. He seemed to have taken the measure of all such ephemeral agitations, and to regard them with an indulgent pity which was worse than coldness.

  “He feels that all we do is so useless,” Campton said to Dastrey; “he’s like a gardener watching ants rebuild their hill in the middle of a path, and knowing all the while that hill and path are going to be wiped out by his pick.”

  “Ah, they’re all like that,” Dastrey murmured.

  Mme. Lebel came up to the studio every afternoon. The charcoal study had been only of her head; but for the painting Campton had seated her in her own horsehair arm-chair, her smoky lamp beside her, her sewing in her lap. More than ever he saw in the wise old face something typical of its race and class: the obstinate French gift, as some one had put it, of making one more effort after the last effort.

  The old woman could not imagine why he wanted to paint her; but when one day he told her it was for her grandsons, her eyes filled, and she said: “For which one, sir? For they’re both at Verdun.”

  One autumn afternoon he was late in getting back to the studio, where he knew she was waiting for him. He pushed the door open, and there, in the beaten-down attitude in which he had once before seen her, she lay across the table, her cap awry, her hands clutching her sewing, and George kneeling at her side. The young man’s arm was about her, his head pressed against her breast; and on the floor lay the letter, the fatal letter which was always, nowadays, the key to such scenes.

  Neither George nor the old woman had heard Campton enter; and for a moment he stood and watched them. George’s face, so fair and ruddy against Mme. Lebel’s rusty black, wore a look of boyish compassion which Campton had never seen on it. Mme. Lebel had sunk into his hold as if it soothed and hushed her; and Campton said to himself: “These two are closer to each other than George and I, because they’ve both seen the horror face to face. He knows what to say to her ever so much better than he knows what to say to his mother or me.”

  But apparently there was no need to say much. George continued to kneel in silence; presently he bent and kissed the old woman’s cheek; then he got to his feet and saw his father.

  “The Chasseur Alpin,” he merely said, picking up the letter and handing it to Campton. “It was the grandson she counted on most.”

  Mme. Lebel caught sight of Campton, smoothed herself and stood up also.

  “I had found him a wife—a strong healthy girl with a good dot. There go my last great-grandchildren! For the other will be killed too. I don’t understand any more, do you?” She made an automatic attempt to straighten the things on the table, but her hands beat the air and George had to head her downstairs.

  It was that day that Campton said to himself: “We shan’t keep him in Paris much longer.” But the heavy weeks of spring and summer passed, the inconclusive conflict at the front went on with its daily toll of dead, and George still stuck to his job. Campton, during this time, continued to avoid the Brants as much as possible. His wife’s conversation was intolerable to him; her obtuse optimism, now that she had got her son back, was even harder to bear than the guiltily averted glance of Mr. Brant, between whom and Campton their last talk had hung a lasting shadow of complicity.

  But most of all Campton dreaded to meet the Talketts; the wife with her flushed cheek-bones and fixed eyes, the husband still affably and continuously arguing against Philistinism. One afternoon the painter stumbled on them, taking tea with George in Boylston’s little flat; but he went away again, unable to bear the interminable discussion between Talkett and Boylston, and the pacifist’s reiterated phrase: “To borrow one of my wife’s expressions”—while George, with a closed brooding face, sat silent, laughing drily now and then. What a different George from the one his father had found, in silence also, kneeling beside Mme. Lebel!

  Once again Campton was vouchsafed a glimpse of that secret George. He had walked back with his son after the funeral mass for young Lebel; and in the porter’s lodge of the Avenue Marigny they found a soldier waiting—a young square-built fellow, with a shock of straw-coloured hair above his sunburnt rural face. Campton was turning from the door when George dashed past him, caught the young man by both shoulders, and shouted his name. It was that of the orderly who had carried him out of the firing-line and hunted him up the next day in the Doullens hospital. Campton saw the look the two exchanged: it lasted only for the taking of a breath; a moment later officer and soldier were laughing like boys, and the orderly was being drawn forth to shake hands with Campton. But again the glance was an illumination; it came straight from that far country, the Benny Upsher country, which Campton so feared to see in his son’s eyes.

  The orderly had been visiting his family, fugitives from the invaded regions who had taken shelter in one of Adele Anthony’s suburban colonies. He had obtained permission to stop in Paris on his way back to the front; and for two joyful days he was lodged and feasted in the Avenue Marigny. Boylston provided him with an evening at Montmartre, George and Mrs. Brant took him to the theatre and the cinema, and on the last day of his leave Adele Anthony invited him to tea with Campton, Mr. Brant and Boylston. Mr. Brant, as they left this entertainment, hung back on the stairs to say in a whisper to Campton: “The family are provided for—amply. I’ve asked George to mention the fact to the young man; but not until just as he’s starting.”

  Campton nodded. For George’s sake he was glad; yet he could not repress a twinge of his dormant jealousy. Was it always to be Brant who thought first of the things to make George happy—always Brant who would alone have the power to carry them out?

  “But he can’t prevent that poor fellow’s getting killed tomorrow,” Campton thought almost savagely, as the young soldier beamed forth from the taxi in which George was hurrying him to the station.

  It was not many days afterward that George looked in at the studio early one morning. Campton, over his breakfast, had been reading the communique. There was heavy news from Verdun; from east to west the air was dark with calamity; but George’s face had the look it had worn when he greeted his orderly.

  “Dad, I’m off,” he said; and sitting down at the table, he unceremoniously poured himself some coffee into his father’s empty cup.

  “The battalion’s been ordered back. I leave to-night. Let’s lunch together somewhere presently, shall we?”

  His eye was clear, his smile confident: a great weight seemed to have fallen from him, and he looked like the little boy sitting up in bed with his Lavengro. “Aft
er ten months of Paris” he added, stretching his arms over his head with a great yawn.

  “Yes—the routine” stammered Campton, not knowing what he said. Yet he was glad too; yes, in his heart of hearts he knew he was glad; though, as always happened, his emotion took him by the throat and silenced him. But it did not matter, for George was talking.

  “I shall have leave a good deal oftener nowadays,” he said with animation. “And everything is ever so much better organized—letters and all that. I shan’t seem so awfully far away. You’ll see.”

  Campton still gazed at him struggling for expression. Their hands met. Campton said—or imagined he said: “I see—I do see, already” though afterward he was not even sure that he had spoken.

  What he saw, with an almost blinding distinctness, was the extent to which his own feeling, during the long months, had imperceptibly changed, and how his inmost impulse, now that the blow had fallen, was not of resistance to it, but of acquiescence, since it made him once more one with his son.

  He would have liked to tell that to George; but speech was impossible. And perhaps, after all, it didn’t matter; it didn’t matter, because George understood. Their hand-clasp had made that clear, and an hour or two later they were lunching together almost gaily.

  Boylston joined them and the three went on together to say goodbye to Adele Anthony. Adele, for once, was unprepared: it was almost a relief to Campton, who winced in advance at the thought her warlike attitude. The poor thing was far from warlike: her pale eyes clung to George’s in a frightened stare, while her lips, a little stiffly, repeated the stock phrases of good cheer. “Such a relief … I congratulate you … getting out of all this paperasserie and red-tape… If I’d been you I couldn’t have stood Paris another minute… The only hopeful people left are at the front…” It was the formula that sped every departing soldier.

  The day wore on. To Campton its hours seemed as interminable yet as rapid as those before his son’s first departure, nearly two years earlier. George had begged his father to come in the evening to the Avenue Marigny, where he was dining with the Brants. It was easier for Campton nowadays to fall in with such requests: during the months of George’s sojourn in Paris a good many angles had had their edges rubbed off.

  Besides, at that moment he would have done anything for his son—his son again at last! In their hand-clasp that morning the old George had come back to him, simple, boyish, just as he used to be; and Campton’s dread of the future was lightened by a great glow of pride.

  In the Avenue Marigny dining-room the Brants and George were still sitting together about the delicate silver and porcelain. There were no flowers: Julia, always correct, had long since banished them as a superfluity. But there was champagne for George’s farewell, and a glimpse of rich fare being removed.

  Mr. Brant rose to greet Campton. His concise features were drawn with anxiety, and with the effort to hide it; but his wife appeared to Campton curiously unperturbed, and the leave-taking was less painful and uselessly drawn out than he had expected.

  George and his father were to be sent to the station in Mr. Brant’s motor. Campton, as he got in, remembered with a shiver the grey morning, before daylight, when the same motor had stood at the studio door, waiting to carry him to Doullens; between himself and his son he seemed to see Mr. Brant’s small suffering profile.

  To shake off the memory he said: “Your mother’s in wonderfully good form. I was glad to see she wasn’t nervous.”

  George laughed. “No. Madge met her this morning at the new clairvoyante’s.—It does them all a lot of good,” he added, with his all-embracing tolerance.

  Campton shivered again. That universal smiling comprehension of George’s always made him seem remoter than ever. “It makes him seem so old—a thousand years older than I am.” But he forced an acquiescent laugh, and presently George went on: “About Madge—you’ll be awfully good to her, won’t you, if I get smashed?”

  “My dear boy!”

  There was another pause, and then Campton risked a question. “Just how do things stand? I know so little, after all.”

  For a moment George seemed to hesitate: his thick fair eyebrows were drawn into a puzzled frown. “I know—I’ve never explained it to you properly. I’ve tried to; but I was never sure that I could make you see.” He paused and added quietly: “I know now that she’ll never divorce Talkett.”

  “You know—?” Campton exclaimed with a great surge of relief.

  “She thinks she will; but I see that the idea still frightens her. And I’ve kept on using the divorce argument only as a pretext.”

  The words thrust Campton back into new depths of perplexity. “A pretext?” he echoed.

  “My dear old Dad—don’t you guess? She’s come to care for me awfully; if we’d gone all the lengths she wanted, and then I’d got killed, there would have been nothing on earth left for her. I hadn’t the right, don’t you see? We chaps haven’t any futures to dispose of till this job we’re in is finished. Of course, if I come back, and she can make up her mind to break with everything she’s used to, we shall marry; but if things go wrong I’d rather leave her as she is, safe in her little old rut. So many people can’t live out of one—and she’s one of them, poor child, though she’s so positive she isn’t.”

  Campton sat chilled and speechless as the motor whirled them on through the hushed streets. It paralyzed his faculties to think that in a moment more they would be at the station.

  “It’s awfully fine: your idea,” he stammered at length. “Awfully—magnanimous.” But he still felt the chill down his spine.

  “Oh, it’s only that things look to us so different—so indescribably different—and always will, I suppose, even after this business is over. We seem to be sealed to it for life.”

  “Poor girl—poor girl!” Campton thought within himself. Aloud he said: “My dear chap, of course you can count on my being—my doing”

  “Of course, of course, old Dad.”

  They were at the station. Father and son got out and walked toward the train. Campton put both hands on George’s shoulders.

  “Look here,” George broke out, “there’s one thing more. I want to tell you that I know what a lot I owe to you and Adele. You’ve both been awfully fine: did you know it? You two first made me feel a lot of things I hadn’t felt before. And you know this is my job; I’ve never been surer of it than at this minute.”

  They clasped hands in silence, each looking his fill of the other; then the crowd closed in, George exclaimed: “My kit-bag!” and somehow, in the confusion, the parting was over, and Campton, straining blurred eyes, saw his son’s smile—the smile of the light-hearted lad of old days—flash out at him from the moving train. For an instant the father had the illusion that it was the goodbye look of the boy George, going back to school after the holidays.

  Campton, as he came out of the station, stumbled, to his surprise, on Mr. Brant. The little man, as they met, flushed and paled, and sought the customary support from his eye-glasses.

  “I followed you in the other motor,” he said, looking away.

  “Oh, I say” Campton murmured; then, with an effort: “Shouldn’t you like me to drive back with you?”

  Mr. Brant shook his head. “Thank you. Thank you very much. But it’s late and you’ll want to be getting home. I’ll be glad if you’ll use my car.” Together they strolled slowly across the station court to the place where the private motors waited; but there Campton held out his hand.

  “Much obliged; I think I’ll walk.”

  Mr. Brant nodded; then he said abruptly: “This clairvoyante business: is there anything to it, do you think? You saw how calm—er—Julia was just now: she wished me to tell you that Spanish woman she goes to—her name is Olida, I think—had absolutely reassured her about … about the future. The woman says she knows that George will come back soon, and never be sent to the front again. Those were the exact words, I believe. Never be sent to the front again. Julia put every
kind of question, and couldn’t trip her up; she wanted me to tell you so. It does sound …? Well, at any rate, it’s a help to the mothers.”

  

  XXXIV.

  The next morning Campton said to himself: “I can catch that goodbye look if I get it down at once” and pulled out a canvas before Mme. Lebel came in with his coffee.

  As sometimes happened to him, the violent emotions of the last twenty-four hours had almost immediately been clarified and transmuted into vision. He felt that he could think contentedly of George if he could sit down at once and paint him.

  The picture grew under his feverish fingers—feverish, yet how firm! He always wondered anew at the way in which, at such hours, the inner flame and smoke issued in a clear guiding radiance. He saw—he saw; and the mere act of his seeing seemed to hold George safe in some pure impenetrable medium. His boy was there, sitting to him, the old George he knew and understood, essentially, vividly face to face with him.

  He was interrupted by a ring. Mme. Lebel, tray in hand, opened the door, and a swathed and voluminous figure, sweeping in on a wave of musk, blotted her out. Campton, exasperated at the interruption, turned to face Mme. Olida.

  So remote were his thoughts that he would hardly have recognized her had she not breathed, on the old familiar guttural: “Juanito!”