Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  Ah, this time it was true—never, never would he be sent to the front again! They had him fast now, had him safe. That was the one certainty. Fast how, safe how?—the answer to that had long hung in the balance. For two weeks or more after his return the surgeons had hesitated. Then youth had seemed to conquer, and the parents had been told to hope that after a long period of immobility George’s shattered frame would slowly re-knit, and he would walk again—or at least hobble. A month had gone by since then; and Campton could at last trust himself to cast his mind back over the intervening days, so like in their anguish to those at Doullens, yet so different in all that material aid and organization could give.

  Evacuation from the base, now so systematically and promptly effected, had become a matter of course in all but the gravest cases; and even the delicate undertaking of deflecting George’s course from the hospital near the front to which he had been destined, and bringing him to Paris, had been accomplished by a word in the right quarter from Mr. Brant.

  Campton, from the first, had been opposed to the attempt to bring George to Paris; partly perhaps because he felt that in the quiet provincial hospital near the front he would be able to have his son to himself. At any rate, the journey would have been shorter; though, as against that, Paris offered more possibilities of surgical aid. His opposition had been violent enough to check his growing friendliness with the Brants; and at the hours when they came to see George, Campton now most often contrived to be absent. Well, at any rate, George was alive, he was there under his father’s eye, he was going to live: there seemed to be no doubt about it now. Campton could think it all over slowly and even calmly, marvelling at the miracle and taking it in… So at least he had imagined till he first made the attempt; then the old sense of unreality enveloped him again, and he struggled vainly to clutch at something tangible amid the swimming mists. “George—

  George—George” he used to say the name over and over below his breath, as he sat and watched at his son’s bedside; but it sounded far off and hollow, like the voice of a ghost calling to another.

  Who was “George”? What did the name represent? The father left his post in the window and turned back to the bed, once more searching the boy’s face for enlightenment. But George’s eyes were closed: sleep lay on him like an impenetrable veil. The sleep of ordinary men was not like that: the light of their daily habits continued to shine through the chinks of their closed faces. But with these others, these who had been down into the lower circles of the pit, it was different: sleep instantly and completely sucked them back into the unknown. There were times when Campton, thus watching beside his son, used to say to himself: “If he were dead he could not be farther from me”—so deeply did George seem plunged in secret traffic with things unutterable.

  Now and then Campton, sitting beside him, seemed to see a little way into those darknesses; but after a moment he always shuddered back to daylight, benumbed, inadequate, weighed down with the weakness of the flesh and the incapacity to reach beyond his habitual limit of sensation. “No wonder they don’t talk to us,” he mused.

  By-and-bye, perhaps, when George was well again, and the war over, the father might penetrate into his son’s mind, and find some new ground of communion with him: now the thing was not to be conceived.

  He recalled again Adele Anthony’s asking him, when he had come back from Doullens: “What was the first thing you felt?” and his answering: “Nothing.” . . Well, it was like that now: every vibration had ceased in him. Between himself and George lay the unbridgeable abyss of his son’s experiences.

  As he sat there, the door was softly opened a few inches and Boylston’s face showed through the crack: light shot from it like the rays around a chalice. At a sign from him Campton slipped out into the corridor and Boylston silently pushed a newspaper into his grasp. He bent over it, trying with dazzled eyes to read sense into the staring head-lines: but “America—America—America” was all that he could see.

  A nurse came gliding up on light feet: the tears were running down her face. “Yes—I know, I know, I know!” she exulted. Up the tall stairs and through the ramifying of long white passages rose an unwonted rumour of sound, checked, subdued, invisibly rebuked, but ever again breaking out, like the noise of ripples on a windless beach. In every direction nurses and orderlies were speeding from one room to another of the house of pain with the message: “America has declared war on Germany.”

  Campton and Boylston stole back into George’s room. George lifted his eyelids and smiled at them, understanding before they spoke.

  “The sixth of April! Remember the date!” Boylston cried over him in a gleeful whisper.

  The wounded man, held fast in his splints, contrived to raise his head a little. His eyes laughed back into Boylston’s. “You’ll be in uniform within a week!” he said; and Boylston crimsoned.

  Campton turned away again to the window. The day had come—had come; and his son had lived to see it. So many of George’s comrades had gone down to death without hope; and in a few months more George, leaning from that same window—or perhaps well enough to be watching the spectacle with his father from the terrace of the Tuileries—would look out on the first brown battalions marching across the Place de la Concorde, where father and son, in the early days of the war, had seen the young recruits of the Foreign Legion patrolling under improvised flags.

  At the thought Campton felt a loosening of the tightness about his heart. Something which had been confused and uncertain in his relation to the whole long anguish was abruptly lifted, giving him the same sense of buoyancy that danced in Boylston’s glance. At last, random atoms that they were, they seemed all to have been shaken into their places, pressed into the huge mysterious design which was slowly curving a new firmament over a new earth…

  There was another knock; and a jubilant nurse appeared, hardly visible above a great bunch of lilacs tied with a starred and striped ribbon. Campton, as he passed the flowers over to his son, noticed an envelope with Mrs. Talkett’s perpendicular scrawl. George lay smiling, the lilacs close to his pillow, his free hand fingering the envelope; but he did not unseal the letter, and seemed to care less than ever to talk.

  After an interval the door opened again, this time to show Mr. Brant’s guarded face. He drew back slightly at the sight of Campton; but Boylston, jumping up, passed close to the painter to breathe: “Today, sir, just today—you must!”

  Campton went to the door and signed silently to Mr. Brant to enter. Julia Brant stood outside, flushed and tearful, carrying as many orchids as Mrs. Talkett had sent lilacs. Campton held out his hand, and with an embarrassed hast she stammered: “we couldn’t wait”

  Behind her he saw Adele Anthony hurriedly coming up the stairs.

  For a few minutes they all stood or sat about George’s bed, while their voices, beginning to speak low, rose uncontrollably, interrupting one another with tears and laughter. Mr. Brant and Boylston were both brimming with news, and George, though he listened more than he spoke, now and then put a brief question which loosened fresh floods. Suddenly Campton noticed that the young man’s face, which had been too flushed, grew pale; but he continued to smile, and his eyes to move responsively from one illuminated face to the other. Campton, seeing that the others meant to linger, presently rose and slipping out quietly walked across the Rue de Rivoli to the deserted terrace of the Tuileries. There he sat for a long time, looking out on the vast glittering spaces of the Place de la Concorde, and calling up, with his painter’s faculty of vivid and precise visualization, a future vision of interminable lines of brown battalions marching past.

  When he returned to the hospital after dinner the night-nurse met him. She was not quite as well satisfied with her patient that evening: hadn’t he perhaps had too many visitors? Yes, of course—she knew it had been a great day, a day of international rejoicing, above all a blessed day for France. But the doctors, from the beginning, must have warned Mr. Campton that his son ought to be kept quiet—ver
y quiet. The last operation had been a great strain on his heart. Yes, certainly, Mr. Campton might go in; the patient had asked for him.

  Oh, there was no danger—no need for anxiety; only he must not stay too long; his son must try to sleep.

  Campton nodded, and stole in.

  George lay motionless in the shaded lamplight: his eyes were open, but they seemed to reflect his father’s presence without any change of expression, like mirrors rather than like eyes. The room was doubly silent after the joyful hubbub of the afternoon. The nurse had put the orchids and lilacs where George’s eyes could rest on them. But was it on the flowers that his gaze so tranquilly dwelt? Or did he see in their place the faces of their senders? Or was he again in that far country whither no other eyes could follow him?

  Campton took his usual seat by the bed. Father and son looked at each other, and the old George glanced out for half a second between the wounded man’s lids.

  “There was too much talking today,” Campton grumbled.

  “Was there? I didn’t notice,” his son smiled.

  No—he hadn’t noticed; he didn’t notice anything. He was a million miles away again, whirling into his place in the awful pattern of that new firmament…

  “Tired, old man?” Campton asked under his breath.

  “No; just glad,” said George contentedly.

  His father laid a hand on his and sat silently beside him while the spring night blew in upon them through the open window. The quiet streets grew quieter, the hush in their hearts seemed gradually to steal over the extinguished city. Campton kept saying to himself: “I must be off,” and still not moving. The nurse was sure to come back presently—why should he not wait till she dismissed him?

  After a while, seeing that George’s eyes had closed, Campton rose, and crept across the room to darken the lamp with a newspaper. His movement must have roused his son, for he heard a light struggle behind him and the low cry: “Father!”

  Campton turned and reached the bed in a stride. George, ashy-white, had managed to lift himself a little on his free elbow.

  “Anything wrong?” the father cried.

  “No; everything all right,” George said. He dropped back, his lids closing again, and a single twitch ran through the hand that Campton had seized. After that he lay stiller than ever.

  

  XXXVI.

  George’s prediction had come true. At his funeral, three days afterward, Boylston, a new-fledged member of the American Military Mission, was already in uniform…

  But through what perversity of attention did the fact strike Campton, as he stood, a blank unfeeling automaton, in the front pew behind that coffin draped with flags and flanked with candle-glitter? Why did one thing rather than another reach to his deadened brain, and mostly the trivial things, such as Boylston’s being already in uniform, and poor Julia’s nose, under the harsh crape, looking so blue-red without its powder, and the chaplain’s asking “O grave, where is thy victory?” in the querulous tone of a schoolmaster reproaching a pupil who mislaid things? It was always so with Campton: when sorrow fell it left him insensible and dumb. Not till long afterward did he begin to feel its birth-pangs…

  They first came to him, those pangs, on a morning of the following July, as he sat once more on the terrace of the Tuileries. Most of his time, during the months since George’s death, had been spent in endless aimless wanderings up and down the streets of Paris: and that day, descending early from Montmartre, he had noticed in his listless way that all the buildings on his way were fluttering with American flags. The fact left him indifferent: Paris was always decorating nowadays for one ally or another. Then he remembered that it must be the Fourth of July; but the idea of the Fourth of July came to him, through the same haze of indifference, as a mere far-off childish memory of surreptitious explosions and burnt fingers. He strolled on toward the Tuileries, where he had got into the way of sitting for hours at a time, looking across the square at what had once been George’s window.

  He was surprised to find the Rue de Rivoli packed with people; but his only thought was the instinctive one of turning away to avoid them, and he began to retrace his steps in the direction of the Louvre. Then at a corner he paused again and looked back at the Place de la Concorde. It was not curiosity that drew him, heaven knew—he would never again be curious about anything—but he suddenly remembered the day three months earlier when, leaning from George’s window in the hospital, he had said to himself “By the time our first regiments arrive he’ll be up and looking at them from here, or sitting with me over there on the terrace”; and that decided him to turn back. It was as if he had felt the pressure of George’s hand on his arm.

  Though it was still so early he had some difficulty in pushing his way through the throng. No seats were left on the terrace, but he managed to squeeze into a corner near one of the great vases of the balustrade; and leaning there, with the happy hubbub about him, he watched and waited.

  Such a summer morning it was—and such a strange grave beauty had fallen on the place! He seemed to understand for the first time—he who served Beauty all his days—how profoundly, at certain hours, it may become the symbol of things hoped for and things died for. All those stately spaces and raying distances, witnesses of so many memorable scenes, might have been called together just as the setting for this one event—the sight of a few brown battalions passing over them like a feeble trail of insects.

  Campton, with a vague awakening of interest, glanced about him, studying the faces of the crowd. Old and young, infirm and healthy, civilians, and soldiers—ah, the soldiers!—all were exultant, confident, alive. Alive! The word meant something new to him now—something so strange and unnatural that his mind still hung and brooded over it. For now that George was dead, by what mere blind propulsion did all these thousands of human beings keep on mechanically living?

  He became aware that a boy, leaning over intervening shoulders, was trying to push a folded paper into his hand. On it was pencilled, in Mr. Brant’s writing: “There will be a long time to wait. Will you take the seat I have kept next to mine?” Campton glanced down the terrace, saw where the little man sat at its farther end, and shook his head. Then some contradictory impulse made him decide to get up, laboriously work his halting frame through the crowd, and insert himself into the place next to Mr. Brant. The two men nodded without shaking hands; after that they sat silent, their eyes on the empty square. Campton noticed that Mr. Brant wore his usual gray clothes, but with a mourning band on the left sleeve. The sight of that little band irritated Campton…

  There was, as Mr. Brant had predicted, a long interval of waiting; but at length a murmur of jubilation rose far off, and gathering depth and volume came bellowing and spraying up to where they sat. The square, the Champs Elysées and all the leafy distances were flooded with it: it was as though the voice of Paris had sprung up in fountains out of her stones. Then a military march broke shrilly on the tumult; and there they came at last, in a scant swaying line—so few, so new, so raw; so little, in comparison with the immense assemblages familiar to the place, so much in meaning and in promise.

  “How badly they march—there hasn’t even been time to drill them properly!” Campton thought; and at the thought he felt a choking in his throat, and his sorrow burst up in him in healing springs…

  It was after that day that he first went back to his work. He had not touched paint or pencil since George’s death; now he felt the inspiration and the power returning, and he began to spend his days among the young American officers and soldiers, studying them, talking to them, going about with them, and then hurrying home to jot down his impressions. He had not, as yet, looked at his last study of George, or opened the portfolio with the old sketches; if any one had asked him, he would probably have said that they no longer interested him. His whole creative faculty was curiously, mysteriously engrossed in the recording of the young faces for whose coming George had yearned.

  “It’s their marching so
badly—it’s their not even having had time to be drilled!” he said to Boylston, half-shamefacedly, as they sat together one August evening in the studio window.

  Campton seldom saw Boylston nowadays. All the young man’s time was taken up by his job with the understaffed and inexperienced Military Mission; but fagged as he was by continual overwork and heavy responsibilities, his blinking eyes had at last lost their unsatisfied look, and his whole busy person radiated hope and encouragement.

  On the day in question he had turned up unexpectedly, inviting himself to dine with Campton and smoke a cigar afterward in the quiet window overhanging Paris. Campton was glad to have him there; no one could tell him more than Boylston about the American soldiers, their numbers, the accommodations prepared for their reception, their first contact with the other belligerents, and their own view of the business they were about. And the two chatted quietly in the twilight till the young man, rising, said it was time to be off.

  “Back to your shop?”

  “Rather! There’s a night’s work ahead. But I’m as good as new after our talk.”

  Campton looked at him wistfully. “You know I’d like to paint you some day.”

  “Oh” cried Boylston, suffused with blushes; and added with a laugh: “It’s my uniform, not me.”

  “Well, your uniform is you—it’s all of you young men.”

  Boylston stood in the window twisting his cap about undecidedly. “Look here, sir—now that you’ve got back to work again—”

  “Well?” Campton interrupted suspiciously.

  The young man cleared his throat and spoke with a rush. “His mother wants most awfully that something should be decided about the monument.”

  “Monument? What monument? I don’t want my son to have a monument,” Campton exploded.

  But Boylston stuck to his point. “It’ll break her heart if something isn’t put on the grave before long. It’s five months now—and they fully recognize your right to decide”