Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (22 page)

 
          
“Men
like what?”

 
          
“Geniuses,”
said Mrs. Brant. “He was dreadfully delicate besides, and was doing admirable
work on some military commission in
Paris
; I believe he knew any number of languages.
And poor Mme. de Dolmetsch—you know I’ve never approved of her; but things are
so changed nowadays, and at any rate she was madly attached to him, and had
done everything to keep him in
Paris
: medical certificates, people at
Headquarters working for her, and all the rest. But it seems there
are no end
of officers always intriguing to get staff-jobs:
strong able-bodied young men who ought to be in the trenches, and are fit for
nothing else, but who are jealous of the others. And last week, in spite of all
she could do, poor Isador was ordered to the front.”

 
          
Campton
made an impatient movement. It was even more distasteful to him to be appealed
to by Mrs. Brant in Isador’s name than by Mme. de Dolmetsch in George’s. His
gorge rose at the thought that people should associate in their minds cases as
different as those of his son and Mme. de Dolmetsch’s lover.

 
          
“I’m
sorry,” he said. “But if you’ve come to ask me to do something more about
George—take any new steps—it’s no use. I can’t do the sort of thing to keep my
son safe that Mme. de Dolmetsch would do for her lover.”

 
          
Mrs.
Brant stared. “Safe? He was killed the day after he got to the front.”

 
          
“Good Lord—Isador?”

 
          
Ladislas
Isador killed at the front! The words remained unmeaning; by no effort could
Campton relate them to the fat middle-aged philanderer with his Jewish eyes,
his Slav eloquence, his Levantine gift for getting on, and for getting out from
under. Campton tried to picture the clever contriving devil drawn in his turn
into that merciless red eddy, and gulped down the Monster’s throat with the
rest. What a mad world it was, in which the same horrible and magnificent doom
awaited the coward and the hero!

 
          
“Poor
Mme. de Dolmetsch!” he muttered, remembering with a sense of remorse her
desperate appeal and his curt rebuff. Once again the poor creature’s love had
enlightened her, and she had foreseen what no one else in the world would have
believed: that her lover was to die like a hero.

 
          
“Isador
was nearly forty, and had a weak heart; and she’d left nothing, literally
nothing, undone to save him.” Campton read in his wife’s eyes what was coming.
“It’s impossible now that George should not be taken,” Mrs. Brant went on.

 
          
The
same thought had tightened Campton’s own heart-strings; but he had hoped she
would not say it.

 
          
“It
may be George’s turn any day,” she insisted.

 
          
They
sat and looked at each other without speaking; then she began again
imploringly: “I tell you there’s not a moment to be lost!”

 
          
Campton
picked up a palette-knife and began absently to rub it with an oily rag. Mrs.
Brant’s anguished voice still sounded on. “Unless something is done immediately…
It appears there’s a regular hunt for embusques, as they’re called. As if it
was everybody’s business to be killed! How’s the staff-work to be carried on if
they’re all taken? But it’s certain that if we don’t act at once … act
energetically
..

 
          
He
fixed his eyes on hers. “Why do you come to me?” he asked.

 
          
Her
lids opened wide. “But he’s our child.”

 
          
“Your
husband knows more people—he has ways, you’ve often told me”

 
          
She
reddened faintly and seemed about to speak; but the reply died on her lips.

 
          
“Why
did you say,” Campton pursued, “that you had come here because you wanted to
see me without
Brant’s knowing
it?”

 
          
She
lowered her eyes and fixed them on the knife he was still automatically
rubbing.

 
          
“Because
Anderson
thinks …
Anderson
won’t … He says he’s done all he can.”

 
          
“Ah”
cried Campton, drawing a deep breath. He threw back his shoulders, as if to
shake off a weight. “I—feel exactly as Brant does,” he declared.

 
          
“You—you
feel as he does?
You, George’s father?
But a father
has never done all he can for his son! There’s always something more that he
can do!”

 
          
The
words, breaking from her in a cry, seemed suddenly to change her from an ageing
doll into a living and agonized woman. Campton had never before felt as near to
her, as moved to the depths by her. For the length of a heart-beat he saw her
again with a red-haired baby in her arms, the light of morning on her face.

 
          
“My
dear—I’m sorry.” He laid his hand on hers.

 
          
“Sorry—sorry?
I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to do something—I want you to save
him!”

 
          
He
faced her with bent head, gazing absently at their interwoven fingers: each
hand had forgotten to release the other.

 
          
“I
can’t do anything more,” he repeated.

 
          
She
started up with a despairing exclamation. “What’s happened to you? Who has
influenced you? What has changed you?”

 
          
How
could he answer her? He hardly knew himself: had hardly been conscious of the
change till she suddenly flung it in his face. If blind animal passion be the
profoundest as well as the fiercest form of attachment, his love for his boy
was at that moment as nothing to hers. Yet his feeling for George, in spite of
all the phrases he dressed it in, had formerly in its essence been no other.
That his boy should survive—survive at any price—that had been all he cared for
or sought to achieve. It had been convenient to justify himself by arguing that
George was not bound to fight for France; but Campton now knew that he would
have made the same effort to protect his son if the country engaged had been his
own.

 
          
In
the careless pre-war world, as George himself had once said, it had seemed
unbelievable that people should ever again go off and die in a ditch to oblige
anybody. Even now, the automatic obedience of the millions of the untaught and
the unthinking, though it had its deep pathetic significance, did not move
Campton like the clear-eyed sacrifice of the few who knew why they were dying.
Jean Fortin, Rene Davril, and such lads as young Louis Dastrey, with his
reasoned horror of butchery and waste in general, and his instant grasp of the
necessity of this particular sacrifice: it was they who had first shed light on
the dark problem.

 
          
Campton
had never before, at least consciously, thought of himself and the few beings
he cared for as part of a greater whole, component elements of the immense
amazing spectacle. But the last four months had shown him man as a defenceless
animal suddenly torn from his shell, stripped of all the interwoven tendrils of
association, habit, background, daily ways and words, daily sights and sounds,
and flung out of the human habitable world into naked ether, where nothing
breathes or lives. That was what war did; that was why those who best
understood it in all its farthest-reaching abomination willingly gave their
lives to put an end to it.

 
          
He
heard Mrs. Brant crying.

 
          
“Julia,”
he said, “Julia, I wish you’d try to see …”

 
          
She
dashed away her tears. “See what? All I see is you, sitting here safe and
saying you can do nothing to save him! But to have the right to say that you
ought to be in the trenches yourself! What do you suppose those young men out
there think of their fathers, safe at home, who are too high-minded and
conscientious to protect them?”

 
          
He
looked at her compassionately. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the bitterest part of
it. But for that, there would hardly be anything in the worst war for us old
people to lie awake about.”

 
          
Mrs.
Brant had stood up and was feverishly pulling on her gloves: he saw that she no
longer heard him. He helped her to draw her furs about her, and stood waiting
while she straightened her veil and tapped the waves of hair into place, her
eyes blindly seeking for a mirror. There was nothing more that either could
say.

 
          
He
lifted the lamp, and went out of the door ahead of her.

 
          
“You
needn’t come down,” she said in a sob; but leaning over the rail into the
darkness he answered: “I’ll give you a light: the
concierges
has
forgotten the lamp
on the stairs.”

 
          
He
went ahead of her down the long greasy flights, and as they reached the ground
floor he heard a noise of feet coming and going, and frightened voices
exclaiming. In the doorway of the porter’s lodge Mrs. Brant’s splendid
chauffeur stood looking on compassionately at a group of women gathered about
Mme. Lebel.

 
          
The
old woman sat in her den, her arms stretched across the table, her sewing
fallen at her feet. On the table lay an open letter. The grocer’s wife from the
corner stood by, sobbing.

 
          
Mrs.
Brant stopped, and Campton, sure now of what was coming, pushed his way through
the neighbours about the door. Mme. Lebel’s eyes met his with the mute reproach
of a tortured animal. “Jules,” she said, “last Wednesday … through the heart.”

 
          
Campton
took her old withered hand. The women ceased sobbing and a hush fell upon the
stifling little room. When Campton looked up again he saw Julia Brant, pale and
bewildered, hurrying toward her motor, and the vault of the porte-cochere sent
back the chauffeur’s answer to her startled question: “Poor old lady—yes, her
only son’s been killed at the front.”

 
          
  

 
          
Campton
sat with his friend Dastrey in the latter’s pleasant little entresol full of
Chinese lacquer and Venetian furniture.

 
          
Dastrey,
in the last days of January, had been sent home from his ambulance with an
attack of rheumatism; and when it became clear that he could no longer be of
use in the mud and cold of the army zone he had reluctantly taken his place
behind a desk at the Ministry of War. The friends had dined early, so that he
might get back to his night-shift; and they sat over coffee and liqueurs, the
mist of their cigars floating across lustrous cabinet-fronts and the worn
gilding of slender consoles.

 
          
On
the other side of the hearth young Boylston, sunk in an armchair, smoked and
listened.

 
          
“It
always comes back to the same thing,” Campton was saying nervously. “What
right have
useless old men like me, sitting here with my
cigar by this good fire, to preach blood and butchery to boys like George and
your nephew?”

 
          
Again
and again, during the days since Mrs. Brant’s visit, he had turned over in his
mind the same torturing question. How was he to answer that last taunt of hers?

 
          
Not
long ago, Paul Dastrey would have seemed the last person to whom he could have
submitted such a problem. Dastrey, in the black August days, starting for the
front in such a frenzy of baffled blood-lust, had remained for Campton the type
of man with whom it was impossible to discuss the war. But three months of hard
service in Postes de Secours and along the awful battle-edge had sent him home
with a mind no longer befogged by personal problems. He had done his utmost,
and knew it; and the fact gave him the professional calm which keeps surgeons
and nurses steady through all the horrors they are compelled to live among.
Those few months had matured and mellowed him more than a lifetime of
Paris
.

 
          
He
leaned back with half-closed lids, quietly considering his friend’s difficulty.

 
          
“I
see. Your idea is that, being unable to do even the humble kind of job that
I’ve been assigned to, you’ve no right not to try to keep your boy out of it if
you can?”

 
          
“Well—by
any honourable means.”

 
          
Dastrey
laughed faintly, and Campton reddened. “The word’s not happy, I admit.”

 
          
“I
wasn’t thinking of that: I was considering how the meaning had evaporated out
of lots of our old words, as if the general smash-up had broken their stoppers.
So many of them, you see,” said Dastrey smiling, “we’d taken good care not to
uncork for centuries. Since I’ve been on the edge of what’s going on fifty
miles from here a good many of my own words have lost their meaning, and I’m
not prepared to say where honour lies in a case like yours.” He mused a moment,
and then went on: “What would George’s view be?”

 
          
Campton
did not immediately reply. Not so many weeks ago he would have welcomed the
chance of explaining that George’s view, %thank God, had remained perfectly
detached and objective, and that the cheerful acceptance of duties forcibly
imposed on him had not in the least obscured his sense of the fundamental
injustice of his being mixed up in the thing at all.

 
          
But
how could he say this now? If George’s view were still what his father had been
in the habit of saying it was, then he held that view alone: Campton himself no
longer thought that any civilized man could afford to stand aside from such a
conflict.

 
          
“As
far as I know,” he said, “George hasn’t changed his mind.”

 
          
Boylston
stirred in his armchair, knocked the ash from his cigar, and looked up at the
ceiling.

 
          
“Whereas
you” Dastrey suggested.

 
          
“Yes,”
said Campton. “I feel differently. You speak of the difference of having been
in contact with what’s going on out there. But how can anybody not be in
contact,
who
has any imagination, any sense of right
and wrong? Do these pictures and hangings ever shut it out from you—or those
books over there, when you turn to them after your day’s work? Perhaps they do,
because you’ve got a real job, a job you’ve been ordered to do, and can’t not
do. But for
a useless drifting devil like
me—my God,
the sights and the sounds of it are always with me!”

 
          
“There
are a good many people who wouldn’t call you useless, Mr. Campton,” said
Boylston.

 
          
Campton
shook his head. “I wish there were any healing in the kind of thing I’m doing;
perhaps there is to you, to whom it appears to come naturally to love your
kind.” (Boylston laughed.) “Service is of no use without conviction: that’s one
of the uncomfortable truths this stir-up has brought to the surface. I was
meant to paint pictures in a world at peace, and I should have more respect for
myself if I could go on unconcernedly doing it, instead of pining to be in all
the places where I’m not wanted, and should be of no earthly use. That’s why”
he paused, looked about him, and sought understanding in Dastrey’s friendly
gaze: “That’s why I respect George’s opinion, which really consists in not
having any, and simply doing without comment the work assigned to him. The
whole thing is so far beyond human measure that one’s individual rage and
revolt seem of no more use than a woman’s scream at an accident she isn’t in.”

 
          
Even
while he spoke, Campton knew he was arguing only against himself. He did not in
the least believe that any individual sentiment counted for nothing at such a
time, and Dastrey really spoke for him in rejoining: “Every one can at least contribute
an attitude: as you have, my dear fellow. Boylston’s here to confirm it.”

 
          
Boylston
grunted his assent.

 
          
“An attitude—an attitude?”
Campton retorted. “The word is
revolting to me! Anything a man like me can do is too easy to be worth doing.
And as for anything one can say: how dare one say anything, in the face of what
is being done out there to keep this room and this fire, and this ragged end of
life, safe for such survivals as you and me?” He crossed to the table to take
another cigar. As he did so he laid an apologetic pressure on his host’s
shoulder. “Men of our age are the chorus of the tragedy, Dastrey; we can’t help
ourselves. As soon as I open my lips to blame or praise I see myself in white
petticoats, with a long beard held on by an elastic, goading on the combatants
in a cracked voice from a safe corner of the ramparts. On the whole I’d sooner
be spinning among the women.”

 
          
“Well,”
said Dastrey, getting up, “I’ve got to get back to my spinning at the Ministry;
where, by the way, there are some very pretty young women at the distaff. It’s
extraordinary how much better pretty
girls
type than
plain ones; I see now why they get all the jobs.”

 
          
The
three went out into the winter blackness. They were used by this time to the
new
Paris
: to extinguished lamps, shuttered windows,
deserted streets, the almost total cessation of wheeled traffic. All through
the winter, life had seemed in suspense everywhere, as much on the battle-front
as in the rear. Day after day, week after week, of vague non-committal news
from west and east; everywhere the enemy baffled but still menacing, everywhere
death, suffering, destruction, without any perceptible oscillation of the
scales, any compensating hope of good to come out of the long slow endless
waste. The benumbed and darkened
Paris
of those February days seemed the visible
image of a benumbed and darkened world.

 
          
Down
the empty asphalt sheeted with rain the rare street lights stretched
interminable reflections. The three men crossed the bridge and stood watching
the rush of the
Seine
. Below them gloomed the vague bulk of
deserted bath-houses, unlit barges, river-steamers out of commission. The
Seine
too had ceased to live: only a single
orange gleam, low on the water’s edge, undulated on the jetty waves like a
streamer of seaweed.

 
          
The
two Americans left Dastrey at his Ministry, and the painter strolled on to
Boylston’s lodging before descending to the underground railway. He, whom his
lameness had made so heavy and indolent, now limped about for hours at a time
over wet pavements and under streaming skies: these
midnight
tramps had become a sort of expiatory need
to him. “Out there—out there, if they had these wet stones under them they’d
think it was the floor of heaven,” he used to muse, driving on obstinately
through rain and darkness.

 
          
The
thought of “Out there” besieged him day and
night,
the
phrase was always in his ears. Wherever he went he was pursued by visions of
that land of doom: visions of fathomless mud, rat-haunted trenches, freezing
nights under the sleety sky, men dying in the barbed wire between the lines or
crawling out to save a comrade and being shattered to death on the return. His
collaboration with Boylston had brought Campton into close contact with these
things. He knew by heart the history of scores and scores of young men of
George’s age who were doggedly suffering and dying a few hours away from the
Palais Royal office where their records were kept. Some of these histories were
so heroically simple that the sense of pain was lost in beauty, as though one
were looking at suffering transmuted into poetry. But others were abominable,
unendurable, in their long-drawn useless horror: stories of cold and filth and
hunger, of ineffectual effort, of hideous mutilation, of men perishing of thirst
in a shell-hole, and half-dismembered bodies dragging themselves back to
shelter only to die as they reached it. Worst of all were the perpetually
recurring reports of military blunders, medical neglect,
carelessness
in high places: the torturing knowledge of the lives that might have been saved
if this or that officer’s brain, this or that surgeon’s hand, had acted more
promptly. An impression of waste, confusion, ignorance, obstinacy, prejudice,
and the indifference of selfishness or of mortal fatigue, emanated from these
narratives written home from the front, or faltered out by white lips on
hospital pillows.

 
          
“The
Friends of French Art,” especially since they had enlarged their range, had to
do with young men accustomed to the freest exercise of thought and criticism. A
nation in arms does not judge a war as simply as an army of professional
soldiers. All these young intelligences were so many subtly-adjusted
instruments for the testing of the machinery of which they formed a part; and
not one accepted the results passively. Yet in one respect all were agreed: the
“had to be” of the first day was still on every lip. The German menace must be
met: chance willed that theirs should be the generation to meet it; on that
point speculation was vain and discussion useless. The question that stirred
them all was how the country they were defending was helping them to carry on
the struggle. There the evidence was cruelly clear, the comment often
scathingly explicit; and Campton, bending still lower over the abyss, caught a
shuddering glimpse of what might be—must be—if political blunders, inertia,
tolerance, perhaps even evil ambitions and connivance, should at last outweigh
the effort of the front. There was no logical argument against such a
possibility. All civilizations had their orbit; all societies rose and fell.
Some day, no doubt, by the action of that law, everything that made the world
livable to Campton and his kind would crumble in new ruins above the old.
Yes—but woe to them by whom such things came; woe to the generation that bowed
to such a law! The Powers of Darkness were always watching and seeking their
hour; but the past was a record of their failures as well as of their triumphs.
Campton, brushing up his history, remembered the great turning-points of
progress, saw how the liberties of
England
had been born of the ruthless discipline of
the Norman
conquest
, and how even out of the hideous
welter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had come more freedom
and a wiser order. The point was to remember that the efficacy of the sacrifice
was always in proportion to the worth of the victims; and there at least his
faith was sure.