Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (25 page)

 
          
She
shrugged her shoulders in the “foreign” way she had picked up in her youth. The
gesture was as incongruous as her slang, but it had become part of her physical
self, which lay in a loose mosaic of incongruities over the solid crystal block
of her character.

 
          
“Why,
indeed? I suppose there are risks everywhere, aren’t there?”

 
          
“I
don’t know.” He pulled out the letter he had received that morning.

 
          
A
sudden light had illuminated it, and his hand shook. “I don’t even know where
George is any longer.”

 
          
She
seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then asked calmly: “What do you mean?”

 
          
“Here—look
at this. We’re to write to his base. I’m to tell his mother of the change.” He
waited, cursing the faint winter light, and the protecting back of her chair.
“What can it mean,” he broke out, “except that he’s left Sainte-Menehould, that
he’s been sent elsewhere, and that he doesn’t want us to find out where?”

 
          
Miss
Anthony bent her long nose over the page. Her hand held the letter steadily,
and he guessed, as she perused it, that she had had one of the same
kind
, and had already drawn her own conclusions. What they
were, that first startled “George!” seemed to say. But would she ever let
Campton see as far into her thoughts again? He continued to watch her hands
patiently, since nothing was to be discovered of her face. The hands folded the
letter with precision, and handed it back to him.

 
          
“Yes:
I see why you thought that—one might have,” she surprised him by conceding.
Then, darting at his unprotected face a gaze he seemed to feel though he could
not see it: “If it had meant that George had been ordered to the front, how
would you have felt?” she demanded.

 
          
He
had not expected the question, and though in the last weeks he had so often
propounded it to himself, it caught him in the chest like a blow. A sense of
humiliation, a longing to lay his weakness bare, suddenly rose in him, and he
bowed his head. “I couldn’t … I couldn’t bear it,” he stammered.

 
          
She
was silent for an interval; then she stood up, and laying her hand on his
shaking shoulder crossed the room to a desk in which he knew she kept her
private papers. Her key clinked, and a moment later she handed him a letter. It
was in George’s writing, and dated on the same day as his own.

 
          
“Dearest old girl, nothing new but my address.
Hereafter
please write to our Base. This order has just been lowered from the empyrean at
the end of an endless reel of red tape. What it means nobody knows. It does not
appear to imply an immediate change of Headquarters; but even if such a change
comes, my job is likely to remain the same. I’m getting used to it, and no
wonder, for one day differeth not from another, and I’ve had many of them now.
Take care of Dad and mother, and of your matchless self. I’m writing to father
today. Your George the First—and Last (or I’ll know why).”

 
          
The
two letters bore one another out in a way which carried conviction. Campton saw
that his sudden doubts must have been produced (since he had not felt them that
morning) by the agonizing experience he had undergone: the vision of Benny
Upsher had unmanned him. George was safe, and asked only to remain so: that was
evident from both letters. And as the certainty of his son’s acquiescence once
more penetrated Campton it brought with it a fresh reaction of shame.
Ashamed—yes, he had begun to be ashamed of George as well as of himself. Under
the touch of Adele Anthony’s implacable honesty his last pretenses shrivelled
up, and he longed to abase himself. He lifted his head and looked at her,
remembering all she would be able to read in his eyes.

 
          
“You’re
satisfied?” she enquired.

 
          
“Yes.
If that’s the word.”
He stretched his hand toward her,
and then drew it back. “But it’s not: it’s not the word any longer.” He
laboured with the need of self-expression, and the opposing instinct of
concealing feelings too complex for Miss Anthony’s simple gaze. How could he
say: “I’m satisfied; but I wish to God that George were not”? And was he
satisfied, after all? And how could he define, or even be sure that he was
actually experiencing, a feeling so contradictory that it seemed to be made up
of anxiety for his son’s safety, shame at that anxiety, shame at George’s own
complacent acceptance of his lot, and terror of a possible change in that lot?
There were hours when it seemed to Campton that the Furies were listening, and
ready to fling their awful answer to him if he as much as whispered to himself:
“Would to God that George were not satisfied!”

 
          
The
sense of their haunting presence laid its clutch on him, and caused him, after
a pause, to finish his phrase in another tone. “No; satisfied’s not the word;
I’m glad George is out of it!” he exclaimed.

 
          
Miss
Anthony was folding away the letter as calmly as if it had been a refugee
record. She did not appear to notice the change in Campton’s voice.

 
          
“I
don’t pretend to your sublime detachment: you’ve never had a child,” he
sneered. (Certainly, if the Furies were listening, they would put that down to
his credit!)

 
          
“Oh,
my poor John,” she said; then she locked the desk, took her hat from the
lamp-chimney on which it had been hanging, jammed it down on her head like a
helmet, and remarked: “We’ll go together, shall we? It’s time I got back to the
office.”

 
          
On
the way downstairs both were silent. Campton’s ears echoed with his stupid
taunt, and he glanced at her without daring to speak. On the last landing she
paused and said: “I’ll see Julia this evening about George’s change of address.
She may be worried; and I can explain—I can take her my letter.”

 
          
“Oh,
do” he assented. “And tell her—tell her—if she needs me”

 
          
It
was as much of a message as he found courage for. Miss Anthony nodded.

 
          
  

 
          
One
day Mme. Lebel said: “The first horse-chestnuts are in bloom. And monsieur must
really buy himself some new shirts.”

 
          
Campton
looked at her in surprise. She spoke in a different voice; he wondered if she
had had good news of her grandchildren. Then he saw that the furrows in her old
face were as deep as ever, and that the change in her voice was simply an
unconscious response to the general stirring of sap, the spring need to go on
living, through everything and in spite of everything.

 
          
On
se fait une raison, as Mme. Lebel would have said. Life had to go on, and new
shirts had to be bought. No one knew why it was necessary, but every one felt
that it was; and here were the horse-chestnuts once more actively confirming
it. Habit laid its compelling grasp on the wires of the poor broken marionettes
with which the Furies had been playing, and they responded, though with feebler
flappings, to the accustomed jerk.

 
          
In
Campton the stirring of the sap had been a cold and languid process, chiefly
felt in his reluctance to go on with his relief work. He had tried to close his
ears to the whispers of his own lassitude, vexed, after the first impulse of
self-dedication, to find that no vocation declared itself, that his task became
each day more tedious as well as more painful. Theoretically, the pain ought to
have stimulated him: perpetual immersion in that sea of anguish should have
quickened his effort to help the poor creatures sinking under its waves. The
woe of the war had had that effect on Adele Anthony, on young Boylston, on
Mile.
Davril, on the greater number of his friends.
But their ardour left him cold. He wanted to help, he wanted it, he was sure,
as earnestly as they; but the longing was not an inspiration to him, and he
felt more and more that to work listlessly was to work ineffectually.

 
          
“I
give the poor devils so many boots and money-orders a day; you give them
yourself, and so does Boylston,” he complained to Miss Anthony; who murmured:
Ah, Boylston” as if that point of the remark were alone worth noticing.

 
          
“At
his age too; it’s extraordinary, the way the boy’s got out of himself.”

 
          
“Or into himself, rather.
He was a pottering boy before—now
he’s a man, with a man’s sense of things.”

 
          
“Yes;
but his patience, his way of getting into their minds, their prejudices, their
meannesses, their miseries! He doesn’t seem to me like the kind who was meant
to be a missionary.”

 
          
“Not
a bit of it… But he’s burnt up with shame at our not being in the war—as all
the young Americans are.”

 
          
Campton
made an impatient movement.
“Benny Upsher again!

 
          
Can’t
we let our government decide all that for us? What else did we elect it for, I
wonder?”

 
          
“I
wonder,” echoed Miss Anthony.

 
          
Talks
of this kind were irritating and unprofitable, and Campton did not again raise
the question. Miss Anthony’s vision was too simplifying to penetrate far into
his doubts, and after nearly a year’s incessant contact with the most savage
realities her mind still seemed at ease in its old formulas.

 
          
Simplicity,
after all, was the best safeguard in such hours. Mrs. Brant was as absorbed in
her task as Adele Anthony. Since the Brant villa at Deauville had been turned
into a hospital she was always on the road, in a refulgent new motor emblazoned
with a Red Cross, carrying supplies, rushing down with great surgeons, hurrying
back to committee meetings and conferences with the Service de Sante (for she
and Mr. Brant were among the leaders in American relief work in Paris), and
throwing open the Avenue Marigny drawing-rooms for concerts, lectures and such
sober philanthropic gaieties as society was beginning to countenance.

 
          
On
the day when Mme. Lebel told Campton that the horse-chestnuts were in blossom
and he must buy some new shirts he was particularly in need of such incentives.
He had made up his mind to go to see Mrs. Brant about a concert for “The
Friends of French Art” which was to be held in her house. Ever since George had
asked him to see something of his mother Campton had used the pretext of
charitable collaboration as the best way of getting over their fundamental lack
of anything to say to each other.

 
          
The
appearance of the Champs Elysées confirmed Mme. Lebel’s announcement.
Everywhere the punctual rosy spikes were rising above unfolding green; and
Campton, looking up at them, remembered once thinking how Nature had adapted
herself to the scene in overhanging with her own pink lamps and green fans the
lamps and fans of the
cafés chantants
beneath. The latter lights had long since been extinguished, the fans folded
up; and as he passed the bent and broken arches of electric light, the iron
chairs and dead plants in paintless boxes, all heaped up like the scenery of a
bankrupt theatre, he felt the pang of Nature’s obstinate renewal in a world of
death. Yet he also felt the stir of the blossoming trees in the form of a more
restless discontent, a duller despair, a new sense of inadequacy. How could war
go on when spring had come?

 
          
Mrs.
Brant, having reduced her household and given over her drawing-rooms to
charity, received in her boudoir, a small room contrived by a clever
upholsterer to simulate a seclusion of which she have never felt the need.
Photographs strewed the low tables; and facing the door Campton saw George’s
last portrait, in uniform, enclosed in an expensive frame. Campton had received
the same photograph, and thrust it into a drawer; he thought a young man on a
safe staff job rather ridiculous in uniform, and at the same time the sight
filled him with a secret dread.

 
          
Mrs.
Brant was bidding good-bye to a lady in mourning whom Campton did not know. His
approach through the carpeted antechamber had been unnoticed, and as he entered
the room he heard Mrs. Brant say in French, apparently in reply to a remark of
her visitor: “Bridge,
chère Madame
?
No; not yet. I confess I haven’t the courage to take up my old life. We mothers
with sons at the front
..
.”