Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (36 page)

 
          
“She’s
a pretty creature,” said George; and at that moment his eyes, resting again on
the little nurse, who was waiting at his door with a cup of cocoa, lit up with
celestial gratitude.

 
          
“The
communique’s good today,” she cried; and he smiled at her boyishly. The war was
beginning to interest him again: Campton was sure that every moment he could
spare from that unimaginable region which his blue eyes guarded like a sword
was spent among his comrades at the front.

 
          
As
the day approached for the return to
Paris
, Campton began to penetrate more deeply
into the meaning of George’s remoteness. He himself, he discovered, had been
all unawares in a far country, a country guarded by a winged sentry, as the old
hymn had it: the region of silent incessant communion with his son. Just they
two: everything else effaced; not discarded, destroyed, not disregarded even,
but blotted out by a soft silver haze, as the brown slopes and distances were,
on certain days, from the windows of the seaward-gazing hospital.

 
          
It
was not that Campton had been unconscious of the presence of other suffering
about them. As George grew stronger, and took his first steps in the wards, he
and his father were inevitably brought into contact with the life of the
hospital. George had even found a few friends, and two or three regimental
comrades, among the officers perpetually coming and going, or enduring the long
weeks of agony which led up to the end. But that was only toward the close of
their sojourn, when George was about to yield his place to others, and be taken
to
Paris
for the re-education of his shattered arm.
And by that time the weeks of solitary communion had left such an imprint on
Campton that, once the hospital was behind him, and no more than a phase of
memory, it became to him as one of its own sea-mists, in which he and his son
might have been peacefully shut away together from all the rest of the world.

 
          
  

 
          
“Preparedness!”
cried Boylston in an exultant crow.

 
          
His
round brown face with its curly crest and peering half-blind eyes beamed at
Campton in the old way across the desk of the Palais Royal office; and from the
corner where she had sunk down on one of the broken-springed divans, Adele
Anthony echoed: “Preparedness!”

 
          
It
was the first time that Campton had heard the word; but the sense of it had
been in the air ever since he and George had got back to
Paris
. He remembered, on the very day of their
arrival, noticing something different in both Boylston and Miss Anthony; and
the change had shown itself in the same ways: both seemed more vivid yet more
remote. It had struck Campton in the moment of first meeting them, in the
Paris
hospital near the
Bois de Boulogne
—Fortin-Lescluze’s old Nursing-Home
transformed into a House of Re-education—to which George had been taken. In the
little cell crowded with flowers—almost too many flowers, his father thought,
for the patient’s aching head and tired eyes—Campton, watching the entrance of
the two visitors, the first to be admitted after Julia and Mr. Brant, had
instantly remarked the air they had of sharing something so secret and
important that their joy at seeing George seemed only the overflow of another
deeper joy.

 
          
Their
look had just such a vividness as George’s own; as their glances crossed,
Campton saw the same light in the eyes of all three. And now, a few weeks
later, the clue to it came to him in Boylston’s new word. Preparedness!
America
, it appeared, had caught it up from east to
west, in that sudden incalculable way she had of flinging herself on a new
idea; from a little group of discerning spirits the contagion had spread like a
prairie fire, sweeping away all the other catchwords of the hour, devouring
them in one great blaze of wrath and enthusiasm.
America
meant to be prepared! First had come the
creation of the training camp at Plattsburg, for which, after long delays and
much difficulty, permission had been wrung from a reluctant government; then,
as candidates flocked to it, as the whole young manhood of the Eastern States
rose to the call, other camps, rapidly planned, were springing up at Fort
Oglethorpe in Georgia, at Fort Sheridan in Illinois, at The Presidio in
California; for the idea was spreading through the West, and the torch kindled
beside the Atlantic seaboard already flashed its light on the Pacific.

 
          
For
hours at a time Campton heard Boylston talking about these training camps with
the young Americans who helped him in his work, or dropped in to seek his
counsel. More than ever, now, he was an authority and an oracle to these stray
youths who were expending their enthusiasm for France in the humblest of
philanthropic drudgery: students of the Beaux Arts or the University, or young
men of leisure discouraged by the indifference of their country and the
dilatoriness of their government, and fired by the desire to take part in a
struggle in which they had instantly felt their own country to be involved in
spite of geographical distance.

 
          
None
of these young men had heard Benny Upsher’s imperious call to be “in it” from
the first, no matter how or at what cost. They were of the kind to wait for a
lead—and now Boylston was giving it to them with his passionate variations on the
great theme of Preparedness. George, meanwhile, lay there in his bed and
smiled; and now and then Boylston brought one or two of the more privileged
candidates to see him. One day Campton found young Louis Dastrey there, worn
and haggard after a bad wound, and preparing to leave for
America
as instructor in one of the new camps. That
seemed to bring the movement closer than ever, to bring it into their very
lives. The thought flashed through Campton: “When George is up, we’ll get him
sent out too”; and once again a delicious sense of security crept through him.

 
          
George,
as yet, was only sitting up for a few hours a day; the wound in the lung was
slow in healing, and his fractured arm in recovering its flexibility. But in
another fortnight he was to leave the hospital and complete his convalescence
at his mother’s.

 
          
The
thought was bitter to Campton; he had had all kinds of wild plans—of taking
George to the Crillon, or hiring an apartment for him, or even camping with him
at the studio. But George had smiled all this away. He meant to return to the
Avenue Marigny, where he always stayed when he came to
Paris
, and where it was natural that his mother
should want him now. Adele Anthony pointed out to Campton how natural it was,
one day as he and she left the Palais Royal together. They were going to lunch
at a near-by restaurant, as they often did on leaving the office, and Campton
had begun to speak of George’s future arrangements. He would be well enough to
leave the hospital in another week, and then no doubt a staff-job could be
obtained for him in Paris—”with Brant’s pull, you know,” Campton concluded,
hardly aware that he had uttered the detested phrase without even a tinge of
irony. But Adele was aware, as he saw by the faint pucker of her thin lips.

 
          
He
shrugged her smile away indifferently. “Oh, well—hang it, yes! Everything’s
changed now, isn’t if? After what the boy’s been through I consider that we’re
more than justified in using Brant’s pull in his favour—or anybody else’s.”

 
          
Miss
Anthony nodded and unfolded her napkin.

 
          
“Well,
then,” Campton continued his argument, “as he’s likely to be in Paris now till
the war is over—which means some time next year, they all say—why shouldn’t I
take a jolly apartment somewhere for the two of us? Those pictures I did last
spring brought me in a lot of money, and there’s no reason” His face lit up.
“Servants, you say?

 
          
Why,
my poor Mariette may be back from
Lille
any time now. They tell me there’s sure to
be a big push in the spring. They’re saving up for that all along the line. Ask
Dastrey … ask…”

 
          
“You’d
better let George go to his mother,” said Miss Anthony concisely.

 
          
“Why?”

 
          
“Because
it’s natural—it’s human. You’re not always, you know,” she added with another
pucker.

 
          
“Not
human?”

 
          
“I
don’t mean that you’re inhuman. But you see things differently.”

 
          
“I
don’t want to see anything but one; and that’s my own son.
How
shall I ever see George if he’s at the Avenue Marigny?”

 
          
“He’ll
come to you.”

 
          
“Yes—when
he’s not at Mrs. Talkett’s!”

 
          
Miss
Anthony frowned. The subject had been touched upon between them soon after
Campton’s return, but Miss Anthony had little light to throw on it: George had
been as mute with her as with every one else, and she knew Mrs. Talkett but
slightly, and seldom saw her. Yet Campton perceived that she could not hear the
young woman named without an involuntary contraction of her brows.

 
          
“I
wish I liked her!” she murmured.

 
          
“Mrs.
Talkett?”

 
          
“Yes—I
should think better of myself if I did. And it might be useful. But I can’t—I can’t!”

 
          
Campton
said within himself: “Oh, women!” For
his own
resentment had died out long ago. He could think of the affair now as one of
hundreds such as happen to young men; he was even conscious of regarding it, in
some unlit secret fold of himself, as a probable guarantee of George’s wanting
to remain in Paris, another subterranean way of keeping him, should such be
needed. Perhaps that was what Miss Anthony meant by saying that her liking Mrs.
Talkett might be “useful.”

 
          
“Why
shouldn’t he be with me?” the father persisted. “He and I were going off
together when the war begun. I was defrauded of that—why shouldn’t I have him
now?”

 
          
Miss
Anthony smiled. “Well, for one thing, because of that very ‘pull’ you were
speaking of.”

 
          
“Oh, the Brants, the Brants!”
Campton glanced impatiently at
the bill-of-fare, grumbled: “Dejeuner du jour, I suppose?” and went on: “Yes; I
might have known it-—he belongs to them. From the minute we got back, and I saw
them at the station, with their motor waiting, and everything arranged as only
money can arrange it, I knew I’d lost my boy again.” He stared moodily before
him. “And yet if the war hadn’t come I should have got him back—I almost had.”

 
          
His
companion still smiled, a little wistfully. She leaned over and laid her hand
on his, under cover of the bill-of-fare. “You did get him back, John, forever
and always, the day he exchanged into the infantry. Isn’t that enough?”

 
          
Campton
answered her smile. “You gallant old chap, you!” he said; and they began to
lunch.

 
          
George
was able to be up now, able to drive out, and to see more people; and Campton
was not surprised, on approaching his door a day or two later, to hear several
voices in animated argument.

 
          
The
voices (and this did surprise him) were all men’s. In one he recognized
Boylston’s deep round notes; but the answering voice, flat, toneless and yet
eager, puzzled him with a sense of something familiar but forgotten. He opened
the door, and saw, at the tea-tray between George and Boylston, the
smoothly-brushed figure of Roger Talkett.

 
          
Campton
had not seen Mrs. Talkett’s husband for months, and in the interval so much had
happened that the young man, always somewhat faintly-drawn, had become as dim
as a daguerreotype held at the wrong angle.