Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (24 page)

 
          
He
paused and looked impressively at the bales of blankets. The piano filled in
the pause, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, without changing her attitude, almost without
moving her lips, sang a few noted of lamentation.

 
          
“Of
that hideous barbarism” Mr. Mayhew began again. “I repeat that I stand here
ready to give up everything I hold most dear”

 
          
“Do
stop him,” Campton whispered to Mrs. Brant.

 
          
Little
Mrs. Talkett, with the quick intuition he had noted in her, sprang up and
threaded her way to the stage. Mme. de Dolmetsch flowed from one widowed pose
into another, and Mr. Mayhew, majestically descending, approached Mrs. Brant.

 
          
“You
agree with me, I hope? You feel that anything more than Mme. de Dolmetsch’s
beautiful voice—anything in the way of a choral accompaniment—would only weaken
my effect? Where the facts are so overwhelming it is enough to state them; that
is,” Mr. Mayhew added modestly, “if they are stated vigorously and tersely—as I
hope they are.”

 
          
Mme.
do
Dolmetsch, with the gesture of a marble mourner torn
from her cenotaph, glided up behind him and laid her hand in Campton’s.

 
          
“Dear
friend, you’ve heard? … You remember our talk? I am Cassandra, cursed with the
hideous gift of divination.” Tears rained down her cheeks, washing off the
paint like mud swept by a shower. “My only comfort,” she added, fixing her
perfect eyes on Mr. Mayhew, “is to help our great good friend in the crusade
against the assassins of my Ladislas.”

 
          
Mrs.
Talkett had said a word to Mr. Mayhew. Campton saw his complacent face go to pieces
as if it had been vitrioled.

 
          
“Benny—Benny”
he screamed, “Benny hurt?
My Benny?
It’s some mistake!
What makes you think?” His eyes met Campton’s.

 
          
“Oh, my God!
Why, he’s my sister’s child!” he cried,
plunging his face into his soft manicured hands.

 
          
In
the cab to which Campton led him, he continued to sob with the full-throated
sobs of a large invertebrate distress, beating his breast for an unfindable
handkerchief, and, when he found it, immediately weeping it into pulp.

 
          
Campton
had meant to leave him at the bank; but when the taxi stopped Mr. Mayhew was in
too pitiful a plight for the painter to resist his entreaty.

 
          
“It
was you who saw Benny last—you can’t leave me!” the poor man implored; and
Campton followed him up the majestic stairway.

 
          
Their
names were taken in to Mr. Brant, and with a motion of wonder at the
unaccountable humours of fate, Campton found himself for the first time
entering the banker’s private office.

 
          
Mr.
Brant was elsewhere in the great glazed labyrinth, and while the visitors
waited, the painter’s registering eye took in the details of the room, from the
Barye cire-perdue on a peach-coloured marble mantel to the blue morocco
armchairs about a giant writing-table. On the table was an electric lamp in a
celadon vase, and just the right number of neatly folded papers lay under a
paper-weight of Chinese crystal. The room was as tidy as an expensive
stage-setting or the cage of a well-kept canary: the only object marring its
order was a telegram lying open on the desk.

 
          
Mr.
Brant, grey and glossy, slipped in on noiseless patent leather. He shook hands
with Mr. Mayhew, bowed stiffly but deprecatingly to Campton, gave his usual
cough, and said: “This is terrible.”

 
          
And
suddenly, as the three men sat there, so impressive and important and
powerless, with that fatal telegram marring the tidiness of the desk, Campton
murmured to himself: “If this thing were to happen to me I couldn’t bear it… I
simply couldn’t bear it…”

 
          
Benny
Upsher was not dead—at least his death was not certain. He had been seen to
fall in a surprise attack near Neuve Chapelle; the telegram, from his
commanding officer, reported him as “wounded and missing.”

 
          
The
words had taken on a hideous significance in the last months. Freezing to death
between the lines, mutilation and torture, or weeks of slow agony in German
hospitals: these were the alternative visions associated with the now familiar
formula. Mr. Mayhew had spent a part of his time collecting details about the
treatment of those who had fallen, alive but wounded, into German hands; and
Campton guessed that as he sat there every one of these details, cruel,
sanguinary, remorseless, had started to life, and that all their victims wore
the face of Benny.

 
          
The
wretched man sat speechless, so unhinged and swinging loose in his grief that
Mr. Brant and Campton could only look on, following the thoughts he was
thinking, seeing the sights he was seeing, and each avoiding the other’s eye
lest they should betray to one another the secret of their shared exultation at
George’s safety.

 
          
Finally
Mr. Mayhew was put in charge of a confidential clerk, who was to go with him to
the English Military Mission in the hope of getting further information. He
went away, small and shrunken, with the deprecating smile of a man who seeks to
ward off a blow; as he left the room Campton heard him say timidly to the
clerk: “No doubt you speak French, sir? The words I want don’t seem to come to
me.”

 
          
Campton
had meant to leave at the same time; but some vague impulse held him back. He
remembered George’s postscript: “Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy,” and wished
he could think of some friendly phrase to ease off his leave-taking. Mr. Brant
seemed to have the same wish. He stood, erect and tightly buttoned, one small
hand resting on the arm of his desk-chair, as though he were posing for a
cabinet size, with the photographer telling him to look natural. His lids
twitched behind his protective glasses, and his upper lip, which was as
straight as a ruler, detached itself by a hair’s breadth from the lower; but no
word came.

 
          
Campton
glanced up and down the white-panelled walls, and spoke abruptly.

 
          
“There
was no reason on earth,” he said, “why poor young Upsher should ever have been
in this thing.”

 
          
Mr.
Brant bowed.

 
          
“This
sort of crazy impulse to rush into other people’s rows,” Campton continued with
rising vehemence, “is of no more use to a civilized state than any other
unreasoned instinct. At bottom it’s nothing but what George calls the baseball
spirit: just an ignorant passion for fisticuffs.”

 
          
Mr.
Brant looked at him intently. “When did—George say that?” he asked, with his
usual cough before the name.

 
          
Campton
coloured. “Oh—er—some time ago: in the very beginning, I think. It was the view
of most thoughtful young fellows at that time.”

 
          
“Quite
so,” said Mr. Brant, cautiously stroking his moustache.

 
          
Campton’s
eyes again wandered about the room.

 
          
“Now,
of course”

 
          
“Ah—now
.. .”

 
          
The
two men looked at each other, and Campton held out his hand. Mr. Brant, growing
pink about the forehead, extended his dry fingers, and they shook hands in
silence.

 
          
  

 
          
In
the street Campton looked about him with the same confused sense as when he had
watched Fortin-Lescluze driving away to Chalous, his dead son’s image in his
eyes.

 
          
Each
time that Campton came in contact with people on whom this calamity had fallen
he grew more acutely aware of his own inadequacy. If he had been
Fortin-Lescluze it would have been impossible for him to go back to Châlons and
resume his task. If he had been Harvey Mayhew, still less could he have
accommodated himself to the intolerable, the really inconceivable, thought that
Benny Upsher had vanished into that fiery furnace like a crumpled letter tossed
into a grate. Young Fortin was defending his country—but Upsher, in God’s name
what was Benny Upsher of
Connecticut
doing in a war between the continental powers?

 
          
Suddenly
Campton remembered that he had George’s letter in his pocket, and that he had
meant to go back with it to Mrs. Brant’s. He had started out that morning full
of the good intentions the letter had inspired; but now he had no heart to
carry them out. Yet George had said: “Let mother know, and explain, please”;
and such an injunction could not be disregarded.

 
          
He
was still hesitating on a street corner when he remembered that Miss Anthony
was probably on her way home for luncheon, and that if he made haste he might
find her despatching her hurried meal. It was instinctive with him, in
difficult hours, to turn to her, less for counsel than for shelter; her simple
unperplexed view of things was as comforting as his mother’s solution of the
dark riddles he used to propound in the nursery.

 
          
He
found her in her little dining-room, with
Delft
plates askew on imitation Cordova leather,
and a Death’s Head Pennon and a Prussian helmet surmounting the nymph in cast
bronze on the mantelpiece. In entering he faced the relentless light of a
ground-glass window opening on an air-shaft; and Miss Anthony, flinging him a
look, dropped her fork and sprang up crying: “George”

 
          
“George—why George?”
Campton recovered his presence of mind
under the shock of her agitation. “What made you think of George?”

 
          
“Your—your
face,” she stammered, sitting down again. “So absurd of me… But you looked… A
seat for monsieur, Jeanne,” she cried over her shoulder to the pantry.

 
          
“Ah—my face?
Yes, I suppose so. Benny Upsher has
disappeared—I’ve just had to break it to Mayhew.”

 
          
“Oh, that poor young Upsher?
How
dreadful!”
Her own face grew instantly serene. “I’m so sorry—so very
sorry… Yes, yes, you shall lunch with me—I know there’s another cutlet,” she
insisted.

 
          
He
shook his head. “I couldn’t.”

 
          
“Well,
then, I’ve finished.” She led the way into the drawing-room. There it was her
turn to face the light, and he saw that her own features were as perturbed as
she had apparently discovered his to be.

 
          
“Poor
Benny, poor boy!” she repeated, in the happy voice she might have had if she
had been congratulating Campton on the lad’s escape. He saw that she was still
thinking not of Upsher but of George, and her inability to fit her intonation
to her words betrayed the violence of her relief. But why had she imagined
George to be in danger?

 
          
Campton
recounted the scene at which he had just assisted, and while she continued to
murmur her sympathy he asked abruptly: “Why on earth should you have been
afraid for George?”

 
          
Miss
Anthony had taken her usual armchair. It was placed, as the armchairs of
elderly ladies usually are, with its high back to the light, and Campton could
no longer observe the discrepancy between her words and her looks. This
probably gave her laugh its note of confidence. “My dear, if you were to cut me
open George’s name would run out of every vein,” she said.

 
          
“But
in that tone—it was your tone. You thought he’d been—that something had
happened,” Campton insisted. “How could it, where he is?”