Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (31 page)

 
          
“What’s
that?” he exclaimed.

 
          
A
huge continuous roar, seeming to fall from the low clouds above them, silenced
the puny rumble and clatter of the road. On and on it went, in a slow pulsating
rhythm, like the boom of waves driven by a gale on some far-distant coast.

 
          
“That?
The guns” said Mr. Brant.

 
          
“At the front?”

 
          
“Oh,
sometimes they seem much nearer.
Depends on the wind.”

 
          
Campton
sat bewildered. Had he ever before heard that sinister roar?
At
Châlons?
He would not be sure. But the sound had assuredly not been the
same; now it overwhelmed him like the crash of the sea over a drowning head. He
cowered back in his corner. Would it ever stop, he asked himself? Or was it
always like this, day and night, in the hell of hells that they were bound for?
Was that merciless thud forever in the ears of the dying?

 
          
A
sentinel stopped the motor and asked for their pass. He turned it about and
about, holding it upside-down in his horny hands, and wrinkling his brows in
the effort to decipher the inverted characters.

 
          
“How
can I tell?” he grumbled doubtfully, looking from the faces of the two
travellers to their unrecognizable photographs.

 
          
Mr.
Brant was already feeling for his pocket, and furtively extracting a bank-note.

 
          
“For
God’s sake—not that!” Campton cried, bringing his hand down on the banker’s.
Leaning over, he spoke to the sentinel. “My son’s dying at the front. Can’t you
see it when you look at me?”

 
          
The
man looked, and slowly gave back the paper. “You can pass,” he said,
shouldering his rifle.

 
          
The
motor shot on, and the two men drew back into their corners. Mr. Brant fidgeted
with his eye-glasses, and after an interval coughed again. “I must thank you,”
he began, “for—for saving me just now from an inexcusable blunder. It was done
mechanically … one gets into the habit…”

 
          
“Quite
so,” said Campton drily. “But there are cases”

 
          
“Of course—of course.”

 
          
Silence
fell once more. Mr. Brant sat bolt upright, his profile detached against the
wintry fields. Campton, sunk into his corner, glanced now and then at the neat
grey silhouette, in which the perpendicular glint of the eye-glass nearest him
was the only point of light. He said to himself that the man was no doubt
suffering horribly; but he was not conscious of any impulse of compassion. He
and Mr. Brant were like two strangers pinned down together in a railway-smash:
the shared agony did not bring them nearer. On the contrary, Campton, as the
hours passed, felt himself more and more exasperated by the mute anguish at his
side. What right had this man to be suffering as he himself was suffering, what
right to be here with him at all? It was simply in the exercise of what the
banker called his “habit”—the habit of paying, of buying everything, people and
privileges and possessions—that he had acquired this ghastly claim to share in
an agony which was not his.

 
          
“I
shan’t even have my boy to myself on his death-bed,” the father thought in
desperation; and the mute presence at his side became once more the symbol of
his own failure.

 
          
The
motor, with frequent halts, continued to crawl slowly on between lorries,
field-kitchens, artillery wagons, companies of haggard infantry returning to
their cantonments, and more and more vanloads of troops pressing forward; it
seemed to Campton that hours elapsed before Mr. Brant again spoke.

 
          
“This
must be
Amiens
,” he said, in a voice even lower than
usual.

 
          
The
father roused himself and looked out. They were passing through the streets of
a town swarming with troops—but he was still barely conscious of what he looked
at. He perceived that he had been half-asleep, and dreaming of George as a
little boy, when he used to have such bad colds. Campton remembered in
particular the day he had found the lad in bed, in a scarlet sweater, in his
luxurious overheated room, reading the first edition of Lavengro. It was on
that day that he and his son had first really got to know each other; but what
was it that had marked the date to George? The fact that Mr. Brant, learning of
his joy in the book, had instantly presented it to him—with the price-label
left inside the cover.

 
          
“And
it’ll be worth a lot more than that by the time you’re grown up,” Mr. Brant had
told his step-son; to which George was recorded to have answered sturdily: “No,
it won’t, if I find other stories I like better.”

 
          
Miss
Anthony had assisted at the conversation and reported it triumphantly to
Campton; but the painter, who had to save up to give his boy even a simple
present, could see in the incident only one more attempt to rob him of his
rights. “They won’t succeed, though, they won’t succeed: they don’t know how to
go about it, thank the Lord,” he had said.

 
          
But
they had succeeded after all; what better proof of it was there than Mr.
Brant’s tacit right to be sitting here beside him today; than the fact that but
for Mr. Brant it might have been impossible for Campton to get to his boy’s
side in time?

 
          
Oh,
that pitiless incessant hammering of the guns! As the travellers advanced the
noise grew louder, fiercer, more unbroken; the closely-fitted panes of the car
rattled and danced like those of an old omnibus. Sentinels stopped the
chauffeur more frequently; Mr. Brant had to produce the blue paper again and
again. The day was wearing on—Campton began again to be aware of a sick
weariness, a growing remoteness and confusion of mind. Through it he perceived
that Mr. Brant, diving into deep recesses of upholstery, had brought out a
silver sandwich-box, a flask and glasses. As by magic they stood on a shiny
shelf which slid out of another recess, and Mr. Brant was proffering the box.
“It’s a long way yet; you’ll need all your strength,” he said.

 
          
Campton,
who had half turned from the invitation, seized a sandwich and emptied one of
the glasses. Mr. Brant was right; he must not let himself float away into the
void, seductive as its drowsy shimmer was.

 
          
His
wits returned, and with them a more intolerable sense of reality. He was all
alive now. Every crash of the guns seemed to tear a piece of flesh from his
body; and it was always the piece nearest the heart. The nurse’s few lines had
said: “A shell wound: the right arm fractured, fear for the lungs.” And one of
these awful crashes had done it: bursting in mystery from that innocent-looking
sky, and rushing inoffensively over hundreds of other young men till it reached
its destined prey, found George, and dug a red grave for him. Campton was
convinced now that his son was dead. It was not only that he had received the
Legion of Honour; it was the appalling all-destroying thunder of the shells as
they went on crashing and bursting. What could they leave behind them but
mismated fragments? Gathering up all his strength in the effort not to recoil
from the vision, Campton saw his son’s beautiful body like a carcass tumbled
out of a butcher’s cart…

 
          
“Doullens,”
said Mr. Brant.

 
          
They
were in a town, and the motor had turned into the court of a great barrack-like
building. Before them stood a line of empty stretchers such as Campton had seen
at Châlons. A young doctor in a cotton blouse was lighting a cigarette and
laughing with a nurse—laughing! At regular intervals the cannonade shook the
windows; it seemed the heart-beat of the place. Campton noticed that many of
the window-panes had been broken, and patched with paper.

 
          
Inside
they found another official, who called to another nurse as she passed by laden
with fresh towels. She disappeared into a room where heaps of bloody linen were
being stacked into baskets, returned, looked at Campton and nodded. He looked
back at her blunt tired features and kindly eyes, and said to himself that they
had perhaps been his son’s last sight on earth.

 
          
The
nurse smiled.

 
          
“It’s
three flights up,” she said; “he’ll be glad.”

 
          
Glad!
He was not dead, then; he could even be glad! In the staggering rush of relief
the father turned instinctively to Mr. Brant; he felt that there was enough joy
to be shared. But Mr. Brant, though he must have heard what the nurse had said,
was moving away; he did not seem to understand.

 
          
“This
way” Campton called after him, pointing to the nurse, who was already on the
first step of the
stairs.

 
          
Mr.
Brant looked slightly puzzled; then, as the other’s meaning reached him, he
coloured a little, bent his head stiffly, and waved his stick toward the door.

 
          
“Thanks,”
he said, “I think I’ll take a stroll first… stretch my
legs .
..” and Campton, with a rush of gratitude, understood that he was to be left
alone with his son.

 
          
  

 
          
He
followed his guide up the steep flights, which seemed to become buoyant and
lift him like waves. It was as if the muscle that always dragged back his lame
leg had suddenly regained its elasticity. He floated up as one mounts stairs in
a dream. A smell of disinfectants hung in the cold air, and once, through a
half-open door, a sickening odour came: he remembered it at Châlons, and
Fortin’s murmured: “Gangrene—ah, if only we could get them sooner!”

 
          
How
soon had they got his boy, Campton wondered? The letter, mercifully sent by
hand to
Paris
, had reached him on the third day after
George’s arrival at the Doullens hospital; but he did not yet know how long
before that the shell-splinter had done its work. The nurse did not know
either. How could she remember? They had so many! The administrator would look
up the files and tell him. Only there was no time for that now.

 
          
On
a landing Campton heard a babble and scream: a nauseating scream in a queer
bleached voice that might have been man, woman or
monkey’s
.
Perhaps that was what the French meant by “a white voice”: this voice which was
as featureless as some of the poor men’s obliterated faces! Campton shot an
anguished look at his companion, and she understood and shook her head. “Oh,
no: that’s in the big ward. It’s the way they scream after a dressing…”

 
          
She
opened a door, and he was in a room with three beds in it, wooden pallets hastily
knocked together and spread with rough grey blankets. In spite of the cold,
flies still swarmed on the unwashed panes, and there were big holes in the
fly-net over the bed nearest the window. Under the net lay a middle-aged
bearded man, heavily bandaged about the chest and left arm: he was snoring, his
mouth open,
his
gaunt cheeks drawn in with the fight
for breath. Campton said to himself that if his own boy lived he should like
some day to do something for this poor devil who was his roommate. Then he
looked about him and saw that the two other beds were empty.

 
          
He
drew back.

 
          
The
nurse was bending over the bearded man. “He’ll wake presently—I’ll leave you”;
and she slipped out. Campton looked again at the stranger; then his glance
travelled to the scarred brown hand on the sheet, a hand with broken nails and
blackened finger-tips. It was George’s hand, his son’s, swollen, disfigured but
unmistakable. The father knelt down and laid his lips on it.

 
          
“What
was the first thing you felt?” Adele Anthony asked him afterward: and he
answered: “Nothing.”