Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (33 page)

 
          
He
stood aside, wrathful, impotent. At least if Brant had been there, perhaps by
some offer of money—but how, to whom? Of what earthly use, after all, was
Brant’s boasted “influence”? These people would only laugh at him—perhaps put
them both out of the hospital!

 
          
He
turned despairingly to the nurse. “You might as well have left him in the
trenches.”

 
          
“Don’t
say that, sir,” she answered; and the echo of his own words horrified him like
a sacrilege.

 
          
Two
of the stretchers were carried into George’s room. Campton caught a glimpse of
George, muttering and tossing; the moonlight lay in the hollows of his bearded
face, and again the father had the sense of utter alienation from that dark
delirious man who for brief intervals suddenly became his son, and then as
suddenly wandered off into strangeness.

 
          
The
nurse slipped out of the room and signed to him.

 
          
“Both
nearly gone … they won’t trouble him long,” she whispered.

 
          
The
man on the third stretcher was taken to a room at the other end of the
corridor. Campton watched him being lifted in. He was to lie on the floor,
then? For in that room there was certainly no vacancy. But presently he had the
answer. The bearers did not come out empty-handed; they carried another man
whom they laid on the empty stretcher. Lucky, lucky devil; going, no doubt, to
a hospital at the rear! As the procession reached the stairs the lantern swung
above the lucky devil’s fact: his eyes stared ceilingward from black orbits.
One arm, swinging loose, dangled down, the hand stealthily counting the steps
as he descended—and no one troubled, for he was dead.

 
          
At
dawn Campton, who must have been asleep, started up, again hearing steps.
The surgeon?
Oh, if this time it
were
the surgeon! But only Mr. Brant detached himself from the shadows accumulated
in the long corridor: Mr. Brant, crumpled and unshorn, with blood-shot eyes,
and gloves on his unconscious hands.

 
          
Campton
glared at him resentfully.

 
          
“Well—how about your surgeon?
I don’t see him!” he
exclaimed.

 
          
Mr.
Brant shook his head despondently. “No—I’ve been waiting all night in the
court. I thought if he came back I should be the first to catch him. But he has
just sent his orderly for instruments; he’s not coming. There’s been terrible
fighting”

 
          
Campton
saw two tears running down Mr. Brant’s face: they did not move him.

 
          
The
banker glanced toward George’s door, full of the question he dared not put.

 
          
Campton
answered it. “You want to know how he
is?
Well, how
should he be, with that bullet in him, and the fever eating him inch by inch,
and two more wounded men in his room? That’s how he is!” Campton almost
shouted.

 
          
Mr.
Brant was trembling all over.

 
          
“Two
more men—in his room?” he echoed shrilly.

 
          
“Yes—bad cases; dying.”
Campton drew a deep breath. “You see
there are times when your money and your influence and your knowing everybody
are no more use than so much sawdust”

 
          
The
nurse opened the door and looked out. “You’re talking too loudly,” she said.

 
          
She
shut the door, and the two men stood silent, abashed; finally Mr. Brant turned
away. “I’ll go and try again. There must be other surgeons … other ways …” he
whispered.

 
          
“Oh, your surgeons … oh, your ways!”
Campton sneered after
him, in the same whisper.

 
          
  

 
          
From
the room where he sat at the foot of George’s glossy white bed, Campton,
through the open door, could watch the November sun slanting down a white ward
where, in the lane between other white beds, pots of chrysanthemums stood on
white-covered tables.

 
          
Through
the window his eyes rested incredulously on a court enclosed in monastic arches
of grey stone, with squares of turf bordered by box hedges, and a fountain
playing. Beyond the court sloped the faded foliage of a park not yet entirely
stripped by Channel gales; and on days without wind, instead of the boom of the
guns, the roar of the sea came faintly over intervening heights and hollows.

 
          
Campton’s
ears were even more incredulous than his eyes. He was gradually coming to
believe in George’s white room, the ward beyond, the flowers between the beds,
the fountain in the court; but the sound of the sea still came to him,
intolerably but unescapably, as the crash of guns. When the impression was too
overwhelming he would turn away from the window and cast his glance on the bed;
but only to find that the smooth young face on the pillow had suddenly changed
into that of the haggard bearded stranger on the wooden pallet at Doullens. And
Campton would have to get up, lean over, and catch the twinkle in George’s eyes
before the evil spell was broken.

 
          
Few
words passed between them. George, after all these days, was still too weak for
much talk; and silence had always been Campton’s escape from feeling. He never
had the need to speak in times of inward stress, unless it
were
to vent his anger—as in that hateful scene at Doullens between himself and Mr.
Brant. But he was sure that George always knew what was passing through his
mind; that when the sea boomed their thoughts flew back together to that other
scene, but a few miles and a few days distant, yet already as far off, as much
an affair they were both rid of, as a nightmare to a wakened sleeper; and that
for a moment the same vision clutched them both, mocking their attempts at
indifference.

 
          
Not
that the sound, to Campton at any rate, suggested any abstract conception of
war. Looking back afterward at this phase of his life he perceived that at no
time had he thought so little of the war. The noise of the sea was to him
simply the voice of the engine which had so nearly destroyed his son: that
association, deeply imbedded in his half-dazed consciousness, left no room for
others.

 
          
The
general impression of unreality was enhanced by his not having yet been able to
learn the details of George’s wounding. After a week during which the boy had
hung near death, the great surgeon—returning to Doullens just as Campton had
finally ceased to hope for him—had announced that, though George’s state was
still grave, he might be moved to a hospital at the rear. So one day, miraculously,
the perilous transfer had been made, in one of Mrs. Brant’s own
motor-ambulances; and for a week now George had lain in his white bed, hung
over by white-gowned Sisters, in an atmosphere of sweetness and order which
almost made it seem as if he were a child recovering from illness in his own
nursery, or a red-haired baby sparring with dimpled fists at a new world.

 
          
In
truth, Campton found his son as hard to get at as a baby; he looked at his
father with eyes as void of experience, or at least of any means of conveying
it. Campton, at first, could only marvel and wait; and the isolation in which
the two were enclosed by George’s weakness, and by his father’s inability to
learn from others what the boy was not yet able to tell him, gave a strange
remoteness to everything but the things which count in an infant’s world: food,
warmth, sleep. Campton’s nearest approach to reality was his daily scrutiny of
the temperature-chart. He studied it as he used to study the communiques which
he now no longer even thought of.

 
          
Sometimes
when George was asleep Campton would sit pondering on the days at Doullens.
There was an exquisite joy in silently building up, on that foundation of
darkness and anguish, the walls of peace that now surrounded him, a structure
so transparent that one could peer through it at the routed Furies, yet so
impenetrable that he sat there in a kind of god-like aloofness. For one thing
he was especially thankful—and that was the conclusion of his unseemly wrangle
with Mr. Brant; thankful that, almost at once, he had hurried after the banker,
caught up with him, and stammered out, clutching his hand: “I know—I know how
you feel.”

 
          
Mr.
Brant’s reactions were never rapid, and the events of the preceding days had
called upon faculties that were almost atrophied. He had merely looked at
Campton in mute distress, returned his pressure, and silently remounted the
hospital stairs with him.

 
          
Campton
hated himself for his ill-temper, but was glad, even at the time, that no
interested motive had prompted his apology. He should have hated himself even
more if he had asked the banker’s pardon because of Mr. Brant’s “pull,” and the
uses to which it might be put; or even if he had associated his excuses with
any past motives of gratitude, such as the fact that but for Mr. Brant he might
never have reached George’s side. Instead of that, he simply felt that once
more his senseless violence had got the better of him, and he was sorry that he
had behaved like a brute to a man who loved George, and was suffering almost as
much as he was at the thought that George might die…

 
          
After
that episode, and Campton’s apology, the relations of the two men became so
easy that each gradually came to take the other for granted; and Mr. Brant,
relieved of a perpetual hostile scrutiny, was free to exercise his ingenuity in
planning and managing. It was owing to him—Campton no longer minded admitting
it—that the famous surgeon had hastened his return to Doullens, that George’s
translation to the sweet monastic building near the sea had been so rapidly
effected, and that the great man, appearing there soon afterward, had extracted
the bullet with his own hand. But for Mr. Brant’s persistence even the leave to
bring one of Mrs. Brant’s motor-ambulances to Doullens would never have been
given; and it might have been fatal to George to make the journey in a slow and
jolting military train. But for Mr. Brant, again, he would have been sent to a
crowded military hospital instead of being brought to this white heaven of
rest. “And all that just because I overtook him in time to prevent his jumping
into his motor and going back to
Paris
in order to get out of my way!” Campton, at
the thought, lowered his spirit into new depths of contrition.

 
          
George,
who had been asleep, opened his eyes and looked at his father.

 
          
“Where’s
Uncle Andy?”

 
          
“Gone to
Paris
to get your mother.”

 
          
“Yes.
Of course.
He told me”

 
          
George
smiled, and withdrew once more into his secret world.

 
          
But
Campton’s state of mind was less happy. As the time of Julia’s arrival
approached he began to ask himself with increasing apprehension how she would
fit into the situation. Mr. Brant had fitted into it—perfectly. Campton had
actually begun to feel a secret dependence on him, a fidgety uneasiness since
he had left for
Paris
, sweet though it was to be alone with George. But Julia—what might she
not do and say to unsettle things, break the spell, agitate and unnerve them
all? Campton did not question her love for her son; but he was not sure what
form it would take in conditions to which she was so unsuited. How could she
ever penetrate into the mystery of peace which enclosed him and his boy? And if
she felt them thus mysteriously shut off would she not dimly resent her
exclusion? If only Adele Anthony had been coming too! Campton had urged Mr.
Brant to bring her; but the banker had failed to obtain a permit for any one
but the boy’s mother. He had even found it difficult to get his own leave
renewed; it was only after a first trip to
Paris
, and repeated efforts at the War Office,
that he had been allowed to go to
Paris
and fetch his wife, who was just arriving
from
Biarritz
.