Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (46 page)

 
          
At
the thought Campton felt a loosening of the tightness about his heart.
Something which had been confused and uncertain in his relation to the whole
long anguish was abruptly lifted, giving him the same sense of buoyancy that
danced in Boylston’s glance. At last, random atoms that they were, they seemed
all to have been shaken into their places, pressed into the huge mysterious
design which was slowly curving a new firmament over a new earth…

 
          
There
was another knock; and a jubilant nurse appeared, hardly visible above a great
bunch of lilacs tied with a starred and striped ribbon. Campton, as he passed
the flowers over to his son, noticed an envelope with Mrs. Talkett’s
perpendicular scrawl. George lay smiling, the lilacs close to his pillow, his
free hand fingering the envelope; but he did not unseal the letter, and seemed
to care less than ever to talk.

 
          
After
an interval the door opened again, this time to show Mr. Brant’s guarded face.
He drew back slightly at the sight of Campton; but Boylston, jumping up, passed
close to the painter to breathe: “Today, sir, just today—you must!”

 
          
Campton
went to the door and signed silently to Mr. Brant to enter. Julia Brant stood
outside, flushed and tearful, carrying as many orchids as Mrs. Talkett had sent
lilacs. Campton held out his hand, and with an embarrassed
hast
she stammered: “we couldn’t wait”

 
          
Behind
her he saw Adele Anthony hurriedly coming up the stairs.

 
          
For
a few minutes they all stood or sat about George’s bed, while their voices,
beginning to speak low, rose uncontrollably, interrupting one another with
tears and laughter. Mr. Brant and Boylston were both brimming with news, and
George, though he listened more than he spoke, now and then put a brief
question which loosened fresh floods. Suddenly Campton noticed that the young
man’s face, which had been too flushed, grew pale; but he continued to smile,
and his eyes to move responsively from one illuminated face to the other.
Campton, seeing that the others meant to linger, presently rose and slipping
out quietly walked across the Rue de Rivoli to the deserted terrace of the
Tuileries. There he sat for a long time, looking out on the vast glittering
spaces of the Place de la Concorde, and calling up, with his painter’s faculty
of vivid and precise visualization, a future vision of interminable lines of
brown battalions marching past.

 
          
When
he returned to the hospital after dinner the night-nurse met him. She was not
quite as well satisfied with her patient that evening: hadn’t he perhaps had
too many visitors? Yes, of course—she knew it had been a great day, a day of
international rejoicing, above all a blessed day for
France
. But the doctors, from the beginning, must
have warned Mr. Campton that his son ought to be kept quiet—very quiet. The
last operation had been a great strain on his heart. Yes, certainly, Mr.
Campton might go in; the patient had asked for him.

 
          
Oh,
there was no danger—no need for anxiety; only he must not stay too long; his
son must try to sleep.

 
          
Campton
nodded, and stole in.

 
          
George
lay motionless in the shaded lamplight: his eyes were open, but they seemed to
reflect his father’s presence without any change of expression, like mirrors
rather than like eyes. The room was doubly silent after the joyful hubbub of
the afternoon. The nurse had put the orchids and lilacs where George’s eyes
could rest on them. But was it on the flowers that his gaze so tranquilly
dwelt? Or did he see in their place the faces of their senders? Or was he again
in that far country whither no other eyes could follow him?

 
          
Campton
took his usual seat by the bed. Father and son looked at each other, and the
old George glanced out for half a second between the wounded man’s lids.

 
          
“There
was too much talking today,” Campton grumbled.

 
          
“Was
there? I didn’t notice,” his son smiled.

 
          
No—he
hadn’t noticed; he didn’t notice anything. He was a million miles away again,
whirling into his place in the awful pattern of that new firmament…

 
          
“Tired, old man?”
Campton asked under his breath.

 
          
“No;
just glad,” said George contentedly.

 
          
His
father laid a hand on his and sat silently beside him while the spring night
blew in upon them through the open window. The quiet streets grew
quieter,
the hush in their hearts seemed gradually to steal
over the extinguished city. Campton kept saying to himself: “I must be off,”
and still not moving. The nurse was sure to come back presently—why should he
not wait till she dismissed him?

 
          
After
a while, seeing that George’s eyes had closed, Campton rose, and crept across
the room to darken the lamp with a newspaper. His movement must have roused his
son, for he heard a light struggle behind him and the low cry: “Father!”

 
          
Campton
turned and reached the bed in a stride. George, ashy-white, had managed to lift
himself a little on his free elbow.

 
          
“Anything
wrong?” the father cried.

 
          
“No;
everything all right,” George said. He dropped back, his lids closing again,
and a single twitch ran through the hand that Campton had seized. After that he
lay stiller than ever.

 
          
  

 
          
George’s
prediction had come true. At his funeral, three days afterward, Boylston, a
new-fledged member of the American Military Mission, was already in uniform…

 
          
But
through what perversity of attention did the fact strike Campton, as he
stood,
a blank unfeeling automaton, in the front pew behind
that coffin draped with flags and flanked with candle-glitter? Why did one
thing rather than another reach to his deadened brain, and mostly the trivial
things, such as Boylston’s being already in uniform, and poor Julia’s nose,
under the harsh crape, looking so blue-red without its powder, and the
chaplain’s asking “O grave, where is thy victory?” in the querulous tone of a
schoolmaster reproaching a pupil who mislaid things? It was always so with
Campton: when sorrow fell it left him insensible and dumb. Not till long
afterward did he begin to feel its birth-pangs…

 
          
They
first came to him, those pangs, on a morning of the following July, as he sat
once more on the terrace of the Tuileries. Most of his time, during the months
since George’s death, had been spent in endless aimless wanderings up and down
the streets of Paris: and that day, descending early from Montmartre, he had
noticed in his listless way that all the buildings on his way were fluttering
with American flags. The fact left him indifferent:
Paris
was always decorating nowadays for one ally
or another. Then he remembered that it must be the Fourth of July; but the idea
of the Fourth of July came to him, through the same haze of indifference, as a
mere far-off childish memory of surreptitious explosions and burnt fingers. He
strolled on toward the Tuileries, where he had got into the way of sitting for
hours at a time, looking across the square at what had once been George’s
window.

 
          
He
was surprised to find the Rue de Rivoli packed with people; but his only
thought was the instinctive one of turning away to avoid them, and he began to
retrace his steps in the direction of the Louvre. Then at a corner he paused
again and looked back at the Place de la Concorde. It was not curiosity that
drew him, heaven knew—he would never again be curious about anything—but he
suddenly remembered the day three months earlier when, leaning from George’s
window in the hospital, he had said to himself “By the time our first regiments
arrive he’ll be up and looking at them from here, or sitting with me over there
on the terrace”; and that decided him to turn back. It was as if he had felt
the pressure of George’s hand on his arm.

 
          
Though
it was still so early he had some difficulty in pushing his way through the
throng. No seats were left on the terrace, but he managed to squeeze into a
corner near one of the great vases of the balustrade; and leaning there, with
the happy hubbub about him, he watched and waited.

 
          
Such
a summer morning it was—and such a strange grave beauty had fallen on the
place! He seemed to understand for the first time—he who served Beauty all his
days—how profoundly, at certain hours, it may become the symbol of things hoped
for and things died for. All those stately spaces and raying distances,
witnesses of so many memorable scenes, might have been called together just as
the setting for this one event—the sight of a few brown battalions passing over
them like a feeble trail of insects.

 
          
Campton,
with a vague awakening of interest, glanced about him, studying the faces of
the crowd. Old and young, infirm and healthy, civilians, and soldiers—ah, the
soldiers!—all were exultant, confident, alive. Alive! The word meant something
new to him now—something so strange and unnatural that his mind still hung and
brooded over it. For now that George was dead, by what mere blind propulsion
did all these thousands of human beings keep on mechanically living?

 
          
He
became aware that a boy, leaning over intervening shoulders, was trying to push
a folded paper into his hand. On it was pencilled, in Mr. Brant’s writing:
“There will be a long time to wait. Will you take the seat I have kept next to
mine?” Campton glanced down the terrace, saw where the little man sat at its
farther end, and shook his head. Then some contradictory impulse made him
decide to get up, laboriously work his halting frame through the crowd, and
insert himself into the place next to Mr. Brant. The two men nodded without
shaking hands; after that they sat silent, their eyes on the empty square.
Campton noticed that Mr. Brant wore his usual gray clothes, but with a mourning
band on the left sleeve. The sight of that little band irritated Campton…

 
          
There
was, as Mr. Brant had predicted, a long interval of waiting; but at length a
murmur of jubilation rose far off, and gathering depth and volume came
bellowing and spraying up to where they sat. The square, the Champs Elysées and
all the leafy distances were flooded with it: it was as though the voice of
Paris
had sprung up in fountains out of her
stones. Then a military march broke shrilly on the tumult; and there they came
at last, in a scant swaying line—so few, so new, so raw; so little, in
comparison with the immense assemblages familiar to the place, so much in
meaning and in promise.

 
          
“How
badly they march—there hasn’t even been time to drill them properly!” Campton
thought; and at the thought he felt a choking in his throat, and his sorrow
burst up in him in healing springs…

 
          
It
was after that day that he first went back to his work. He had not touched
paint or pencil since George’s death; now he felt the inspiration and the power
returning, and he began to spend his days among the young American officers and
soldiers, studying them, talking to them, going about with them, and then
hurrying home to jot down his impressions. He had not, as yet, looked at his
last study of George, or opened the portfolio with the old sketches; if any one
had asked him, he would probably have said that they no longer interested him.
His whole creative faculty was curiously, mysteriously engrossed in the
recording of the young faces for whose coming George had yearned.

 
          
“It’s
their marching so badly—it’s their not even having had time to be drilled!” he
said to Boylston, half-shamefacedly, as they sat together one August evening in
the studio window.

 
          
Campton
seldom saw Boylston nowadays. All the young man’s time was taken up by his job
with the understaffed and inexperienced Military Mission; but fagged as he was
by continual overwork and heavy responsibilities, his blinking eyes had at last
lost their unsatisfied look, and his whole busy person radiated hope and
encouragement.