Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (45 page)

 
          
“Yes.
Don’t you feel how we’re all being swept into it?” panted Boylston
breathlessly. His face had caught the illumination. “Sealed, as George
says—we’re sealed to the job every one of us! Even I feel that, sitting here at
a stuffy desk…” He flushed crimson and his eyes filled. “We’ll be in it, you
know; America will—in a few weeks now, I believe! George was as sure of it as I
am. And, of course, if the war goes on, our army will have to take
short-sighted officers; won’t they, sir?
As England and
France did from the first.
They’ll need the men; they’ll need us all,
sir!”

 
          
“They’ll
need you, my dear chap; and they’ll have you, to the full, whatever your job
is,” Campton smiled; and Boylston, choking back a sob, dashed off again.

 
          
Yes,
they were all being swept into it together—swept into the yawning whirlpool.
Campton felt that as clearly as all these young men; he felt the triviality,
the utter unimportance, of all their personal and private concerns, compared
with this great headlong outpouring of life on the altar of conviction. And he
understood why, for youths like George and Boylston, nothing, however close and
personal to them, would matter till the job was over. “And not even for poor
Talkett!” he reflected whimsically.

 
          
That
afternoon, curiously appeased, he returned once more to his picture of his son.
He had sketched the boy leaning out of the train window, smiling back,
signalling, saying goodbye, while his destiny rushed him out into darkness as
years ago the train used to rush him back to school. And while Campton worked
he caught the glow again; it rested on brow and eyes, and spread in sure
touches under his happy brush.

 
          
One
day, as the picture progressed, he wavered over the remembrance of some little
detail of the face, and went in search of an old portfolio into which, from
time to time, he had been in the habit of thrusting his unfinished studies of
George. He plunged his hand into the heap, and Georges of all ages looked forth
at him: round baby-Georges, freckled schoolboys, a thoughtful long-faced youth
(the delicate George of St. Moritz); but none seemed quite to serve his purpose
and he rummaged on till he came to a page torn from an old sketch-book. It was
the pencil study he had made of George as the lad lay asleep at the Crillon,
the night before his mobilisation.

 
          
Campton
threw the sketch down on the table; and as he sat staring at it he relived
every phase of the emotion out of which it had been born. How little he had
known then—how little he had understood!
he
could bear
to look at the drawing now; could bear even to rethink the shuddering thoughts
with which he had once flung it away from him. Was it only because the
atmosphere was filled with a growing sense of hope? Because, in spite of
everything, the victory of Verdun was there to show the inexhaustible strength
of France, because people were more and
more sure
that
America was beginning to waken … or just because, after too long and fierce a
strain, human nature always instinctively contrives to get its necessary whiff
of moral oxygen? Or was it that George’s influence had really penetrated him,
and that this strange renewed confidence in life and in ideals was his son’s
message of reassurance?

 
          
Certainly
the old George was there, close to him, that morning; and somewhere else—in
scenes how different—he was sure that the actual George, at that very moment,
was giving out force and youth and hope to those about him.

 
          
“I
couldn’t be doing this if I didn’t understand—at last,” Campton thought as he
turned back to the easel The little pencil sketch had given him just the hint
he needed, and he took up his palette with a happy sigh.

 
          
A
knock broke in on his rapt labour, and without turning he called out: “Damn it,
who are you? Can’t you read the sign? Not in!”

 
          
The
door opened and Mr. Brant entered.

 
          
He
appeared not to have heard the painter’s challenge; his eyes, from the
threshold, sprang straight to the portrait, and remained vacantly fastened
there. Campton, long afterward, remembered thinking, as he followed the glance:
“He’ll be trying to buy this one too!”

 
          
Mr.
Brant moistened his lips, and his gaze, detaching itself from George’s face,
moved back in the same vacant way to Campton’s. The two men looked at each
other, and Campton jumped to his feet.

 
          
“Not—not?”

 
          
Mr.
Brant tried to speak, and the useless effort contracted his mouth in a pitiful
grimace.

 
          
“My son?”
Campton shrieked, catching him by the arm. The
little man dropped into a chair.

 
          
“Not
dead … not dead… Hope …
hope
…” was shaken out of him
in jerks of anguish.

 
          
The
door burst open again, and Boylston dashed in beaming. He waved aloft a handful
of morning papers.

 
          
“America!
You’ve seen? They’ve sacked Bernstorff! Broken off diplomatic”

 
          
His
face turned white, and he stood staring incredulously from one of the two bowed
men to the other.

 
          
  

 
          
Campton
once more stood leaning in the window of a Paris hospital.

 
          
Before
him, but viewed at another angle, was spread that same great spectacle of the
Place de la Concorde that he had looked down at from the Crillon on the eve of
mobilisation; behind him, in a fresh white bed, George lay in the same attitude
as when his father had stood in the door of his room and sketched him while he
slept.

 
          
All
day there had run through Campton’s mind the clairvoyante’s promise to Julia:
“Your son will come back soon, and will never be sent to the front again.”

 
          
Ah,
this time it was true—never, never would he be sent to the front again! They
had him fast now, had him safe. That was the one certainty. Fast how, safe
how?—the answer to that had long hung in the balance. For two weeks or more
after his return the surgeons had hesitated. Then youth had seemed to conquer,
and the parents had been told to hope that after a long period of immobility
George’s shattered frame would slowly re-knit, and he would walk again—or at
least hobble. A month had gone by since then; and Campton could at last trust
himself to cast his mind back over the intervening days, so like in their
anguish to those at Doullens, yet so different in all that material aid and
organization could give.

 
          
Evacuation
from the base, now so systematically and promptly effected, had become a matter
of course in all but the gravest cases; and even the delicate undertaking of
deflecting George’s course from the hospital near the front to which he had
been destined, and bringing him to Paris, had been accomplished by a word in
the right quarter from Mr. Brant.

 
          
Campton,
from the first, had been opposed to the attempt to bring George to Paris;
partly perhaps because he felt that in the quiet provincial hospital near the
front he would be able to have his son to himself. At any rate, the journey
would have been shorter; though, as against that, Paris offered more
possibilities of surgical aid. His opposition had been violent enough to check
his growing friendliness with the Brants; and at the hours when they came to
see George, Campton now most often contrived to be absent. Well, at any rate,
George was alive, he was there under his father’s eye,
he
was going to live: there seemed to be no doubt about it now. Campton could
think it all over slowly and even calmly, marvelling at the miracle and taking
it in… So at least he had imagined till he first made the attempt; then the old
sense of unreality enveloped him again, and he struggled vainly to clutch at
something tangible amid the swimming mists. “George—

 
          
George—George”
he used to say the name over and over below his breath, as he sat and watched
at his son’s bedside; but it sounded far off and hollow, like the voice of a
ghost calling to another.

 
          
Who
was “George”? What did the name represent? The father left his post in the
window and turned back to the bed, once more searching the boy’s face for
enlightenment. But George’s eyes were closed: sleep lay on him like an
impenetrable veil. The sleep of ordinary men was not like that: the light of
their daily habits continued to shine through the chinks of their closed faces.
But with these others, these who had been down into the lower circles of the
pit, it was different: sleep instantly and completely sucked them back into the
unknown. There were times when Campton, thus watching beside his son, used to
say to himself: “If he were dead he could not be farther from me”—so deeply did
George seem plunged in secret traffic with things unutterable.

 
          
Now
and then Campton, sitting beside him, seemed to see a little way into those
darknesses; but after a moment he always shuddered back to daylight, benumbed,
inadequate, weighed down with the weakness of the flesh and the incapacity to
reach beyond his habitual limit of sensation. “No wonder they don’t talk to
us,” he mused.

 
          
By-and-bye,
perhaps, when George was well again, and the war over, the father might
penetrate into his son’s mind, and find some new ground of communion with him:
now the thing was not to be conceived.

 
          
He
recalled again Adele Anthony’s asking him, when he had come back from Doullens:
“What was the first thing you felt?” and his answering: “Nothing.
” .
. Well, it was like that now: every vibration had ceased
in him. Between himself and George lay the unbridgeable abyss of his son’s
experiences.

 
          
As
he sat there, the door was softly opened a few inches and Boylston’s face
showed through the crack: light shot from it like the rays around a chalice. At
a sign from him Campton slipped out into the corridor and Boylston silently
pushed a newspaper into his grasp. He bent over it, trying with dazzled eyes to
read sense into the staring head-lines: but “
America
—
America
—
America
” was all that he could see.

 
          
A
nurse
came
gliding up on light feet: the tears were
running down her face. “Yes—I know, I know, I know!” she exulted. Up the tall
stairs and through the ramifying of long white passages rose an unwonted rumour
of sound, checked, subdued, invisibly rebuked, but ever again breaking out,
like the noise of ripples on a windless beach. In every direction nurses and
orderlies were speeding from one room to another of the house of pain with the
message: “
America
has declared war on
Germany
.”

 
          
Campton
and Boylston stole back into George’s room. George lifted his eyelids and
smiled at them, understanding before they spoke.

 
          
“The
sixth of April! Remember the date!” Boylston cried over him in a gleeful
whisper.

 
          
The
wounded man, held fast in his splints, contrived to raise his head a little.
His eyes laughed back into Boylston’s. “You’ll be in uniform within a week!” he
said; and Boylston crimsoned.

 
          
Campton
turned away again to the window. The day had come—had come; and his son had
lived to see it. So many of George’s comrades had gone down to death without
hope; and in a few months more George, leaning from that same window—or perhaps
well enough to be watching the spectacle with his father from the terrace of
the Tuileries—would look out on the first brown battalions marching across the
Place de la Concorde, where father and son, in the early days of the war, had
seen the young recruits of the Foreign Legion patrolling under improvised
flags.