Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (23 page)

 
          
He
could not, he felt, leave his former wife’s appeal unnoticed; after a day or
two he wrote to George, telling him of Mrs. Brant’s anxiety, and asking in
vague terms if George himself thought any change in his situation probable. His
letter ended abruptly: “I suppose it’s hardly time yet to ask for leave”

 
          
  

 
          
Not
long after his
midnight
tramp with Boylston and Dastrey the post brought Campton two letters. One was
postmarked
Paris
,
the other bore the military frank and was
addressed in his son’s hand: he laid it aside while he glanced at the first. It
contained an engraved card:

 
          
MRS. ANDERSON BRANT
 
At Home on February 20th at 4 o’clock
 
Mr. Harvey Mayhew will give an account
of his captivity in Germany
 
Mme. de Dolmetsch will sing
 
For the benefit of the “Friends of
French Art Committee”
 
Tickets 100 francs

 
          
Enclosed
was the circular of the sub-committee in aid of Musicians at the Front, with
which Campton was not directly associated. It bore the names of Mrs. Talkett,
Mme. Beausite and a number of other French and American ladies.

 
          
Campton
tossed the card away. He was not annoyed by the invitation: he knew that Miss
Anthony and Mile. Davril were getting up a series of drawing-room
entertainments for that branch of the charity, and that the card had been sent
to him as a member of the Honorary Committee. But any reminder of the sort
always gave a sharp twitch to the Brant nerve in him. He turned to George’s
letter.

 
          
It
was no longer than usual; but in other respects it was unlike his son’s
previous communications. Campton read it over two or three times.

 
          
“Dear
Dad, thanks for yours of the tenth, which must have come to me on skis, the
snow here is so deep.” (There had, in fact, been a heavy snow-fall in the
Argonne
.) “Sorry mother is bothering about things
again; as you’ve often reminded me, they always have a way of ‘being as they
will be,’ and even war doesn’t seem to change it.
Nothing to
worry her in my case—but you can’t expect her to believe that, can you?
Neither you nor I can help it I suppose.

 
          
“There’s
one thing that might help, though; and that is, your letting her feel that
you’re a little nearer to her. War makes a lot of things look differently,
especially this sedentary kind of war: it’s rather like going over all the old
odds-and-ends in one’s cupboards. And some of them do look so foolish.

 
          
“I
wish you’d see her now and then—just naturally, as if it had happened. You know
you’ve got one Inexhaustible Topic between you. The said I.T. is doing well,
and has nothing new to communicate up to now except a change of address.
Hereafter please write to my Base instead of directing here, as there’s some
chance of a shift of H.Q. The precaution is probably just a new twist of the
old red tape, signifying nothing; but Base will always reach me if we are
shifted. Let mother know, and explain, please; otherwise she’ll think the
unthinkable.

 
          
“Interrupted
by big drive—quill-drive, of course!

 
          
“As ever “Georgius Scriblerius.

 
          
“P.S.
Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy either.

 
          
“No.
2.—I had thought of leave; but perhaps you’re right about that.”

 
          
It
was the first time George had written in that way of his mother. His smiling
policy had always been to let things alone, and go on impartially dividing his
devotion between his parents, since they refused to share even that common
blessing. But war gave everything a new look; and he had evidently, as he put
it, been turning over the old things in his cupboards. How was it possible,
Campton wondered, that after such a turning-over he was still content to write
“Nothing new to communicate,” and to make jokes about another big quill-drive?
Glancing at the date of the letter, Campton saw that it had been written on the
day after the first ineffectual infantry assault on Vauquois. And George was
sitting a few miles off, safe in headquarters at Sainte-Menehould, with a stout
roof over his head and a beautiful brown gloss on his boots, scribbling punning
letters while his comrades fell back from that bloody summit…

 
          
Suddenly
Campton’s eyes filled. No; George had not written that letter for the sake of
the joke: the joke was meant to cover what went before it. Ah, how young the
boy was to imagine that his father would not see! Yes, as he said, war made so
many of the old things look foolish…

 
          
Campton
set out for the Palais Royal. He felt happier than for a long time past: the
tone of his boy’s letter seemed to correspond with his own secret change of
spirit. He knew the futility of attempting to bring the Brants and himself
together, but was glad that George had made the suggestion. He resolved to see
Julia that afternoon.

 
          
At
the Palais Royal he found the indefatigable Boylston busy with an exhibition of
paintings sent home from the front, and Mile.
Davril helping
to catalogue them.
Lamentable pensioners came and went, bringing fresh
tales of death, fresh details of savagery; the air was dark with poverty and
sorrow. In the background Mme. Beausite flitted about, tragic and ineffectual.
Boylston had not been able to extract a penny from Beausite for his secretary
and the latter’s left-handed family; but Mme. Beausite had discovered a
newly-organized charity which lent money to “temporarily embarrassed”
war-victims; and with an artless self-satisfaction she had contrived to obtain
a small loan for the victim of her own thrift. “For what other purpose are such
charities founded?” she said, gently disclaiming in advance the praise which
Miss Anthony and Boylston had no thought of offering her. Whenever Campton came
in she effaced herself behind a desk, where she bent her beautiful white head
over a card-catalogue without any perceptible results.

 
          
The
telephone rang. Boylston, after a moment, looked up from the receiver.

 
          
“Mr.
Campton!”

 
          
The
painter glanced apprehensively at the instrument, which still seemed to him
charged with explosives.

 
          
“Take
the message, do. The thing always snaps at me.”

 
          
There
was a listening pause: then Boylston said: “It’s about Upsher”

 
          
Campton
started up. “Killed?”

 
          
“Not
sure. It’s Mr. Brant. The news was wired to the bank; they want you to break it
to Mr. Mayhew.”

 
          
“Oh,
Lord,” the painter groaned, the boy’s face suddenly rising before his blurred
eyes. Miss Anthony was not at the office that morning, or he would have turned
to her; at least she might have gone with him on his quest. He could not ask
Boylston to leave the office, and he felt that curious incapacity to deal with
the raw fact of sorrow which had often given an elfin unreality to the most
poignant moments of his life. It was as though experience had to enter into the
very substance of his soul before he could even feel it.

 
          
“Other
people,” he thought, “would know what to say, and I shan’t
.
..
”

 
          
Some
one, meanwhile, had fetched a cab, and he drove to the Nouveau Luxe, though
with little hope of finding Mr. Mayhew. But Mr. Mayhew had grown two
secretaries, and turned the shrimp-pink drawing-room into an office. One of the
secretaries was there, hammering at a typewriter. She was a competent young
woman, who instantly extracted from her pocket-diary the fact that her chief
was at Mrs. Anderson Brant’s, rehearsing.

 
          
“Rehearsing?”

 
          
“Why,
yes; he’s to speak at Mrs. Brant’s next week on Atrocities,” she said,
surprised at Campton’s ignorance.

 
          
She
suggested telephoning; but in the shrunken households of the rich, where but
one or two servants remained, telephoning had become as difficult as in the
under-staffed hotels; and after one or two vain attempts Campton decided to go
to the Avenue Marigny. He felt that to get hold of Mayhew as soon as possible
might still in some vague way help poor Benny—since it was not yet sure that he
was dead. “Or else it’s just the need to rush about,” he thought, conscious
that the only way he had yet found of dealing with calamity was a kind of
ant-like agitation.

 
          
On
the way the round pink face of Benny Upsher continued to float before him in
its very substance, with the tangibility that only a painter’s visions wear. “I
want to be in this thing,” he heard the boy repeating, as if impelled by some
blind instinct flowing down through, centuries and centuries of persistent
childish minds.

 
          
“If
he or his forebears had ever thought things out he probably would have been
alive and safe today,” Campton mused, “like George… The average person is
always just obeying impulses stored up thousands of years ago, and never
re-examined since.” But this consideration, though drawn from George’s own
philosophy, did not greatly comfort his father.

 
          
At
the Brants’ a bewildered
concierges
admitted him and rang a bell which no one answered. The vestibule and the
stairs were piled with bales of sheeting, bulging jute-bags, stacked-up
hospital supplies. A boy in scout’s uniform swung inadequate legs from the
lofty porter’s arm-chair beside the table with its monumental bronze inkstand.
Finally, from above, a maid called to Campton to ascend.

 
          
In
the drawing-room pictures and tapestries, bronzes and pates tendres, had
vanished, and
a plain
moquette replaced the priceless
Savonnerie across whose pompous garlands Campton had walked on the day of his
last visit.

 
          
The
maid led him to the ball-room.
Through double doors of glass
Mr. Mayhew’s oratorical accents, accompanied by faint chords on the piano,
reached Campton’s ears: he paused and looked.
At the far end of the
great gilded room, on a platform backed by velvet draperies, stood Mr. Mayhew,
a perfect pearl in his tie and a perfect crease in his trousers. Beside him was
a stage-property tripod surmounted by a classical perfume-burner; and on it
Mme. de Dolmetsch, swathed in black, leaned in an attitude of affliction.

 
          
Beneath
the platform a bushy-headed pianist struck an occasional chord from Chopin’s
Dead March; and near the door three or four Red Cross nurses perched on bales
of blankets and listened. Under one of their coifs Campton recognized Mrs.
Talkett. She saw him and made a sign to the lady nearest her; and the latter,
turning, revealed the astonished eyes of Julia Brant.

 
          
Campton’s
first impression, while they shook hands under cover of Mr. Mayhew’s rolling
periods, was of his former wife’s gift of adaptation. She had made herself a
nurse’s face; not a theatrical imitation of it like Mme. de Dolmetsch’s, nor
yet the face of a nurse on a war-poster, like Mrs. Talkett’s. Her lovely hair
smoothed away under her strict coif, her chin devoutly framed in linen, Mrs.
Brant look serious, tender and efficient. Was it possible that she had found
her vocation?

 
          
She
gave him a glance of alarm, but his eyes must have told her that he had not
come about George, for with a reassured smile she laid a finger on her lip and
pointed to the platform; Campton noticed that her nails were as beautifully
polished as ever.

 
          
Mr.
Mayhew was saying: “All that I have to give, yes, all that is most precious to
me,
I am ready to surrender, to offer up, to lay down in the
Great Struggle which is to save the world from barbarism. I, who was one of the
first Victims of that
barbarism
. ..