Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (30 page)

 
          
All
these things would have weighed on him even more if the outer weight of events
had not been so much heavier. He had not returned to Mrs. Talkett’s since the
banker’s visit; he did not wish to meet
Jorgenstein,
and his talk with the banker, and his visit to the clairvoyante, had somehow
combined to send that whole factitious world tumbling about his ears. It was
absurd to attach any importance to poor Olida’s vaticinations; but the
vividness of her description of the baby-faced boy dying in a German hospital
haunted Campton’s nights. If it were not the portrait of Benny Upsher it was at
least that of hundreds and thousands of lads like him, who were thus groping
and agonizing and stretching out vain hands, while in Mrs. Talkett’s
drawing-room well-fed men and expensive women heroically “forgot the war.”
Campton, seeking to expiate his own brief forgetfulness by a passion of renewed
activity, announced to Boylston the next afternoon that he was coming back to
the office.

 
          
Boylston
hardly responded: he looked up from his desk with a face so strange that
Campton broke off to cry out: “What’s happened?”

 
          
The
young man held out a newspaper. “They’ve done it—they’ve done it!” he shouted.
Across the page the name of the
Lusitania
blazed out like the writing on the wall.

 
          
The
Berserker light on Boylston’s placid features transformed him into an avenging
cherub. “Ah, now we’re in it at last!” he exulted, as if the horror of the
catastrophe were already swallowed up in its result. The two looked at each
other without further words; but the older man’s first thought had been for his
son. Now, indeed,
America
was “in it”: the gross tangible proof for which her government had
forced her to wait was there in all its unimagined horror. Cant and cowardice
in high places had drugged and stupefied her into the strange belief that she
was too proud to fight for others; and here she was brutally forced to fight
for herself. Campton waited with a straining heart for his son’s first comment
on the new fact that they were “in it.”

 
          
But
his excitement and Boylston’s exultation were short-lived. Before many days it
became apparent that the proud nation which had flamed up overnight at the
unproved outrage of the
Maine
was lying supine under the flagrant provocation of the
Lusitania
. The days which followed were, to many
Americans, the bitterest of the war: to Campton they seemed the ironic
justification of the phase of indifference and self-absorption through which he
had just passed. He could not go back to Mrs. Talkett and her group; but
neither could he take up his work with even his former zeal. The bitter taste
of the national humiliation was perpetually on his lips: he went about like a
man dishonoured.

 
          
He
wondered, as the days and the weeks passed, at having no word from George. Had
he refrained from writing because he too felt the national humiliation too
deeply either to speak of it or to leave it unmentioned? Or was he so sunk in
security that he felt only a mean thankfulness that nothing was changed? From
such thoughts Campton’s soul recoiled; but they lay close under the surface of
his tenderness, and reared their evil heads whenever they caught him alone.

 
          
As
the summer dragged
itself
out he was more and more
alone. Dastrey, cured of his rheumatism, had left the Ministry to resume his
ambulance work. Miss Anthony was submerged under the ever-mounting tide of
refugees. Mrs. Brant had taken a small house at
Deauville
(on the pretext of being near her
hospital), and Campton heard of the Talketts’ being with her, and others of
their set. Mr. Mayhew appeared at the studio one day, in tennis flannels and a new
straw hat, announcing that he “needed rest,” and rather sheepishly adding that
Mrs. Brant had suggested his spending “a quiet fortnight” with her. “I’ve got
to do it, if I’m to see this thing through,” Mr. Mayhew added in a stern voice,
as if commanding himself not to waver.

 
          
A
few days later, glancing over the Herald, Campton read that Mme. de Dolmetsch,
“the celebrated artiste,” was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Brant at
Deauville
, where she had gone to give recitations for
the wounded in hospital. Campton smiled, and then thought with a tightening
heart of Benny Upsher and Ladislas Isador, so incredibly unlike in their lives,
so strangely one in their death. Finally, not long afterward, he read that the
celebrated financier, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein (recently knighted by the British
Government) had bestowed a gift of a hundred thousand francs upon Mrs. Brant’s
hospital. It was rumoured, the paragraph ended, the Sir Cyril would soon
receive the Legion of Honour for his magnificent liberalities to
France
.

 
          
And
still the flood of war rolled on. Success here, failure there, the menace of
disaster elsewhere—Russia retreating to the San, Italy declaring war on Austria
and preparing to cross the Isonzo, the British advance at Anzac, and from the
near East news of the new landing at Suvla. Through all this alternating of
tragedy and triumph ran the million and million individual threads of hope,
fear, fortitude, resolve, with which the fortune of the war was obscurely but
fatally interwoven. Campton remembered his sneer at Dastrey’s phrase: “One can
at least contribute an attitude.” He had begun to feel the force of that, to
understand the need of every human being’s “pulling his weight” in the
struggle, had begun to scan every face in the street in the passionate effort
to distinguish between the stones in the wall of resistance and the cracks
through which discouragement might filter.

 
          
The
shabby office of the Palais Royal again became his only haven. His portrait of
Mrs. Talkett had brought him many new orders; but he refused them all, and
declined even to finish the pictures interrupted by the war. One of his abrupt
revulsions of feeling had flung him back, heart and brain, into the horror he
had tried to escape from. “If thou ascend up into heaven I am there; if thou
make thy bed in hell, behold I am there,” the war said to him; and as the daily
head-lines shrieked out the names of new battle-fields, from the Arctic shore
to the Pacific, he groaned back like the Psalmist: “Whither shall I go from
thee?”

 
          
The people about him—Miss Anthony, Boylston, Mile.
Davril,
and all their band of tired resolute workers—plodded
ahead, their eyes on their task, seeming to find in its fulfillment a partial
escape from the intolerable oppression. The women especially, with their gift
of living in the particular, appeared hardly aware of the appalling development
of the catastrophe; and Campton felt himself almost as lonely among these
people who thought of nothing but the war as among those who hardly thought of
it at all. It was only when he and Boylston, after a hard morning’s work, went
out to lunch together, that what he called the Lusitania look, suddenly
darkening the younger man’s face, moved the painter with an anguish like his
own.

 
          
Boylston,
breaking through his habitual shyness, had one day remonstrated with Campton
for not going on with his painting: but the latter had merely rejoined: “We’ve
each of us got to worry through this thing in our own way—” and the subject was
not again raised between them.

 
          
The
intervals between George’s letters were growing longer. Campton, who noted in
his pocket-diary the dates of
all that
he received, as
well as those addressed to Mrs. Brant and Miss Anthony, had not had one to
record since the middle of June. And in that there was no allusion to the
Lusitania
.

 
          
“It’s
queer,” he said to Boylston, one day toward the end of July; “I don’t know yet
what George thinks about the
Lusitania
.”

 
          
“Oh,
yes, you do, sir!” Boylston returned, laughing; “but all the mails from the
war-zone,” he added, “have been very much delayed lately. When there’s a big
attack on anywhere they hold up everything along the line. And besides, no
end of letters are
lost.”

 
          
“I
suppose so,” said Campton, pocketing the diary, and trying for the millionth
time to call up a vision of his boy, seated at a desk in some still
unvisualized place, his rumpled fair head bent above columns of figures or
files of correspondence, while day after day the roof above him shook with the
roar of the attacks which held up his letters.

 
          
  

 
          
The
gates of
Paris
were behind them, and they were rushing
through an icy twilight between long lines of houses, factory chimneys and
city-girt fields, when Campton at last roused himself and understood.

 
          
It
was he, John Campton, who sat in that car—that noiseless swiftly-sliding car,
so cushioned and commodious, so ingeniously fitted for all the exigencies and
emergencies of travel, that it might have been a section of the Nouveau Luxe on
wheels; and the figure next to him, on the extreme other side of the deeply
upholstered seat, was that of Anderson Brant. This, for the moment, was as far
as Campton’s dazed perceptions carried him…

 
          
The
motor was among real fields and orchards, and the icy half-light which might
just as well have been dusk was turning definitely to dawn, when at last,
disentangling his mind from a tight coil of passport and permit problems, he
thought: “But this is the road north of
Paris
—that must have been St. Denis.”

 
          
Among
all the multiplied strangenesses of the last strange hours it had hardly struck
him before that, now he was finally on his way to George, it was not to the
Argonne
that he was going, but in the opposite
direction. The discovery held his floating mind for a moment, but for a moment
only, before it drifted away again, to be caught on some other projecting
strangeness.

 
          
Chief
among these was Mr. Brant’s presence at his side, and the fact that the motor
they were sitting in was Mr. Brant’s. But Campton felt that such enormities were
not to be dealt with yet. He had neither slept nor eaten since the morning
before, and whenever he tried to grasp the situation in its entirety his spirit
fainted away again into outer darkness…

 
          
His
companion presently coughed, and said, in a voice even more than usually
colourless and expressionless: “We are at Luzarches already.”

 
          
It
was the first time, Campton was sure, that Mr. Brant had spoken since they had
got into the car together, hours earlier as it seemed to him, in the dark
street before the studio in Montmartre; the first, at least, except to ask, as
the chauffeur touched the self-starter: “Will you have the rug over you?”

 
          
The
two travellers did not share a rug: a separate one, soft as fur and light as
down, lay neatly folded on the grey carpet before each seat; but Campton,
though the early air was biting, had left his where it lay, and had not
answered.

 
          
Now
he was beginning to feel that he could not decently remain silent any longer;
and with an effort which seemed as mechanical and external as the movements of
the chauffeur whose back he viewed through the wide single sheet of
plate-glass, he brought out, like a far-off echo: “Luzarches …?”

 
          
It
was not that there lingered in him any of his old sense of antipathy toward Mr.
Brant. In the new world into which he had been abruptly hurled, the previous
morning, by the coming of that letter which looked so exactly like any other
letter—in this new world Mr. Brant was nothing more than the possessor of the
motor and of the “pull” that were to get him, Campton, in the shortest possible
time, to the spot of earth where his son lay dying. Once assured of this,
Campton had promptly and indifferently acquiesced in Miss Anthony’s hurried
suggestion that it would be only decent to let Mr. Brant go to Doullens with
him.

 
          
But the exchange of speech with any one, whether Mr. Brant or
another, was for the time being manifestly impossible.
The effort, to
Campton, to rise out of his grief, was like that of a dying person struggling
back from regions too remote for his voice to reach the ears of the living. He
shrank into his corner, and tried once more to fix his attention on the flying
landscape.

 
          
All
that he saw in it, speeding ahead of him even faster than their own flight, was
the ghostly vision of another motor, carrying a figure bowed like his, mute
like his: the figure of Fortin-Lescluze, as he had seen it plunge away into the
winter darkness after the physician’s son had been killed. Campton remembered
asking himself then, as he had asked himself so often since: “How should I bear
it if it happened to me?”

 
          
He
knew the answer to that now, as he knew everything else a man could know: so it
had seemed to his astonished soul since the truth had flashed at him out of
that fatal letter. Ever since then he had been turning about and about in a
vast glare of initiation: of all the old crowded misty world which the letter
had emptied at a stroke, nothing remained but a few memories of George’s
boyhood, like a closet of toys in a house knocked down by an earthquake.

 
          
The
vision of Fortin-Lescluze’s motor vanished, and in its place Campton suddenly
saw Boylston’s screwed-up eyes staring out at him under furrows of anguish.
Campton remembered, the evening before, pushing the letter over to him across
the office table, and stammering:

 
          
“Read
it—read it to me. I can’t” and Boylston’s sudden sobbing explosion: “But I
knew, sir—I’ve known all along …” and then the endless pause before Campton
gathered himself up to falter out (like a child deciphering the words in a
primer): “You knew—knew that George was wounded?”

 
          
“No,
no, not that; but that he might be—oh, at any minute! Forgive me—oh, do forgive
me! He wouldn’t let me tell you that he was at the front,” Boylston had
faltered through his sobs.

 
          
“Let
you tell me?”

 
          
“You
and his mother: he refused a citation last March so that you shouldn’t find out
that he’d exchanged into an infantry regiment. He was determined to from the
first. He’s been fighting for months; he’s been magnificent; he got away from
the
Argonne
last February; but you were none of you to
know.”

 
          
“But
why—why—why?” Campton had flashed out; then his heart stood still, and he
awaited the answer with lowered head.

 
          
“Well,
you see, he was afraid: afraid you might prevent… use your influence … you and
Mrs. Brant…”

 
          
Campton
looked up again, challenging the other. “He imagined perhaps that we had—in the
beginning?”

 
          
“Oh,
yes”—Boylston was perfectly calm about it—”he knew all about that. And he made
us swear not to speak; Miss Anthony and me. Miss Anthony knew… If this thing
happened,” Boylston ended in a stricken voice, “you were not to be unfair to
her, he said.”

 
          
Over
and over again that short dialogue distilled itself syllable by syllable, pang
by pang, into Campton’s cowering soul. He had had to learn all this, this
overwhelming unbelievable truth about his son; and at the same instant to learn
that that son was grievously wounded, perhaps dying (what else, in such
circumstances, did the giving of the Legion of Honour ever mean?); and to deal
with it all in the wild minutes of preparation for departure, of intercession
with the authorities, sittings at the photographer’s, and a crisscross of
confused telephone-calls from the Embassy, the Prefecture and the War Office.

 
          
From
the welter of images Miss Anthony’s face next detached itself: white and
withered, yet with a look which triumphed over its own ruin, and over Campton’s
wrath.

 
          
“Ah—you
knew too, did you? You were his other confidant? How you all kept it up—how you
all lied to us!” Campton had burst out at her.

 
          
She
took it firmly. “I showed you his letters.”

 
          
“Yes:
the letters he wrote to you to be shown.”

 
          
She
received this in silence, and he followed it up. “It was you who drove him to
the front—it was you who sent my son to his death!”

 
          
Without
flinching, she gazed back at him. “Oh, John—it was you!”

 
          
“I—I?
What do you mean? I never as much as lifted a finger”

 
          
“No?”
She gave him a wan smile. “Then it must have been the old man who invented the
Mangle!” she cried, and cast herself on Campton’s breast. He held her there for
a long moment, stroking her lank hair, and saying “Adele—Adele,” because in
that rush of understanding he could not think of anything else to say. At
length he stooped and laid on her lips the strangest kiss he had ever given or
taken; and it was then that, drawing back, she exclaimed: “That’s for George,
when you get to him. Remember!”

 
          
The
image of George’s mother rose last on the whirling ground of Campton’s
thoughts: an uncertain image, blurred by distance, indistinct as some wraith of
Mme. Olida’s evoking.

 
          
Mrs.
Brant was still at
Biarritz
; there had been no possibility of her getting back in time to share the
journey to the front. Even Mr. Brant’s power in high places must have fallen
short of such an attempt; and it was not made. Boylston, despatched in haste to
bear the news of George’s wounding to the banker, had reported that the utmost
Mr. Brant could do was to write at once to his wife, and arrange for her return
to
Paris
, since telegrams to the frontier departments
travelled more slowly than letters, and in nine cases out of ten were delayed
indefinitely. Campton had asked no more at the time but in the last moment
before leaving Paris he remembered having said to Adele Anthony: “You’ll be
there when Julia comes?” and Miss Anthony had nodded back: “At the station.”

 
          
The
word, it appeared, roused the same memory in both of them; meeting her eyes, he
saw there the Gare de l’Est in the summer morning, the noisily manoeuvring
trains jammed with bright young heads, the flowers, the waving handkerchiefs,
and everybody on the platform smiling fixedly till some particular
carriage-window slid out of sight. The scene, at the time, had been a vast blur
to Campton: would he ever again, he wondered, see anything as clearly as he saw
it now, in all its unmerciful distinctness? He heard the sobs of the girl who
had said such a blithe goodbye to the young Chasseur Alpin, he saw her going
away, led by her elderly companion, and powdering her nose at the laiterie over
the cup of coffee she could not swallow. And this was what her sobs had meant…

 
          
“This
place,” said Mr. Brant, with his usual preliminary cough, “must be—” He bent
over a motor-map, trying to decipher the name; but after fumbling for his
eye-glasses, and rubbing them with a beautifully monogrammed cambric
handkerchief, he folded the map up again and slipped it into one of the many
pockets which honeycombed the interior of the car. Campton recalled the
deathlike neatness of the banker’s private office on the day when the one spot
of disorder in it had been the torn telegram announcing Benny Upsher’s
disappearance.

 
          
The
motor lowered its speed to make way for a long train of army
lorries
.
Close upon them clattered a file of gun-wagons, with unshaven soldiers bestriding
the gaunt horses. Torpedo-cars carrying officers slipped cleverly in and out of
the tangle, and motor-cycles, incessantly rushing by, peppered the air with
their explosions.

 
          
“This
is the sort of thing he’s been living in—living in for months and months,”
Campton mused.

 
          
He
himself had seen something of the same kind when he had gone to Châlons in the
early days to appeal to Fortin-Lescluze; but at that time the dread
significance of the machinery of war had passed almost unnoticed in his
preoccupation about his boy. Now he realized that for a year that machinery had
been the setting of his boy’s life; for months past such sights and sounds as
these had formed the whole of George’s world; and Campton’s eyes took in every
detail with an agonized avidity.