XXIV
The gates of Paris were behind them, and they were rushing through an
icy twilight between long lines of houses, factory chimneys and
city-girt fields, when Campton at last roused himself and understood.
It was he, John Campton, who sat in that car—that noiseless
swiftly-sliding car, so cushioned and commodious, so ingeniously fitted
for all the exigencies and emergencies of travel, that it might have
been a section of the Nouveau Luxe on wheels; and the figure next to
him, on the extreme other side of the deeply upholstered seat, was that
of Anderson Brant. This, for the moment, was as far as Campton’s dazed
perceptions carried him....
The motor was among real fields and orchards, and the icy half-light
which might just as well have been dusk was turning definitely to dawn,
when at last, disentangling his mind from a tight coil of passport and
permit problems, he thought: “But this is the road north of Paris—that
must have been St. Denis.”
Among all the multiplied strangenesses of the last strange hours it had
hardly struck him before that, now he was finally on his way to George,
it was not to the Argonne that he was going, but in the opposite
direction. The discovery held his floating mind for a moment, but for a
moment only, before it drifted away again, to be caught on some other
projecting strangeness.
Chief among these was Mr. Brant’s presence at his side, and the fact
that the motor they were sitting in was Mr. Brant’s. But Campton felt
that such enormities were not to be dealt with yet. He had neither slept
nor eaten since the morning before, and whenever he tried to grasp the
situation in its entirety his spirit fainted away again into outer
darkness....
His companion presently coughed, and said, in a voice even more than
usually colourless and expressionless: “We are at Luzarches already.”
It was the first time, Campton was sure, that Mr. Brant had spoken since
they had got into the car together, hours earlier as it seemed to him,
in the dark street before the studio in Montmartre; the first, at least,
except to ask, as the chauffeur touched the self-starter: “Will you have
the rug over you?”
The two travellers did not share a rug: a separate one, soft as fur and
light as down, lay neatly folded on the grey carpet before each seat;
but Campton, though the early air was biting, had left his where it lay,
and had not answered.
Now he was beginning to feel that he could not decently remain silent
any longer; and with an effort which seemed as mechanical and external
as the movements of the chauffeur whose back he viewed through the wide
single sheet of plate-glass, he brought out, like a far-off echo:
“Luzarches...?”
It was not that there lingered in him any of his old sense of antipathy
toward Mr. Brant. In the new world into which he had been abruptly
hurled, the previous morning, by the coming of that letter which looked
so exactly like any other letter—in this new world Mr. Brant was nothing
more than the possessor of the motor and of the “pull” that were to get
him, Campton, in the shortest possible time, to the spot of earth where
his son lay dying. Once assured of this, Campton had promptly and
indifferently acquiesced in Miss Anthony’s hurried suggestion that it
would be only decent to let Mr. Brant go to Doullens with him.
But the exchange of speech with any one, whether Mr. Brant or another,
was for the time being manifestly impossible. The effort, to Campton, to
rise out of his grief, was like that of a dying person struggling back
from regions too remote for his voice to reach the ears of the living.
He shrank into his corner, and tried once more to fix his attention on
the flying landscape.
All that he saw in it, speeding ahead of him even faster than their own
flight, was the ghostly vision of another motor, carrying a figure bowed
like his, mute like his: the figure of Fortin-Lescluze, as he had seen
it plunge away into the winter darkness after the physician’s son had
been killed. Campton remembered asking himself then, as he had asked
himself so often since: “How should I bear it if it happened to me?”
He knew the answer to that now, as he knew everything else a man could
know: so it had seemed to his astonished soul since the truth had
flashed at him out of that fatal letter. Ever since then he had been
turning about and about in a vast glare of initiation: of all the old
crowded misty world which the letter had emptied at a stroke, nothing
remained but a few memories of George’s boyhood, like a closet of toys
in a house knocked down by an earthquake.
The vision of Fortin-Lescluze’s motor vanished, and in its place Campton
suddenly saw Boylston’s screwed-up eyes staring out at him under furrows
of anguish. Campton remembered, the evening before, pushing the letter
over to him across the office table, and stammering: “Read it—read it to
me. I can’t——” and Boylston’s sudden sobbing explosion: “But I _knew_,
sir—I’ve known all along ...” and then the endless pause before Campton
gathered himself up to falter out (like a child deciphering the words in
a primer): “You _knew_—knew that George was wounded?”
“No, no, not that; but that he might be—oh, at any minute! Forgive
me—oh, do forgive me! He wouldn’t let me tell you that he was at the
front,” Boylston had faltered through his sobs.
“Let you tell me——?”
“You and his mother: he refused a citation last March so that you
shouldn’t find out that he’d exchanged into an infantry regiment. He was
determined to from the first. He’s been fighting for months; he’s been
magnificent; he got away from the Argonne last February; but you were
none of you to know.”
“But why—why—why?” Campton had flashed out; then his heart stood still,
and he awaited the answer with lowered head.
“Well, you see, he was afraid: afraid you might prevent ... use your
influence ... you and Mrs. Brant....”
Campton looked up again, challenging the other. “He imagined perhaps
that we _had_—in the beginning?”
“Oh, yes”—Boylston was perfectly calm about it—“he knew all about that.
And he made us swear not to speak; Miss Anthony and me. Miss Anthony
knew.... If this thing happened,” Boylston ended in a stricken voice,
“you were not to be unfair to her, he said.”
Over and over again that short dialogue distilled itself syllable by
syllable, pang by pang, into Campton’s cowering soul. He had had to
learn all this, this overwhelming unbelievable truth about his son; and
at the same instant to learn that that son was grievously wounded,
perhaps dying (what else, in such circumstances, did the giving of the
Legion of Honour ever mean?); and to deal with it all in the wild
minutes of preparation for departure, of intercession with the
authorities, sittings at the photographer’s, and a crisscross of
confused telephone-calls from the Embassy, the Prefecture and the War
Office.
From this welter of images Miss Anthony’s face next detached itself:
white and withered, yet with a look which triumphed over its own ruin,
and over Campton’s wrath.
“Ah—you knew too, did you? You were his other confidant? How you all
kept it up—how you all lied to us!” Campton had burst out at her.
She took it firmly. “I showed you his letters.”
“Yes: the letters he wrote to you to be shown.”
She received this in silence, and he followed it up. “It was you who
drove him to the front—it was you who sent my son to his death!”
Without flinching, she gazed back at him. “Oh, John—it was you!”
“I—I? What do you mean? I never as much as lifted a finger——”
“No?” She gave him a wan smile. “Then it must have been the old man who
invented the Mangle!” she cried, and cast herself on Campton’s breast.
He held her there for a long moment, stroking her lank hair, and saying
“Adele—Adele,” because in that rush of understanding he could not think
of anything else to say. At length he stooped and laid on her lips the
strangest kiss he had ever given or taken; and it was then that, drawing
back, she exclaimed: “That’s for George, when you get to him. Remember!”
The image of George’s mother rose last on the whirling ground of
Campton’s thoughts: an uncertain image, blurred by distance, indistinct
as some wraith of Mme. Olida’s evoking.
Mrs. Brant was still at Biarritz; there had been no possibility of her
getting back in time to share the journey to the front. Even Mr. Brant’s
power in high places must have fallen short of such an attempt; and it
was not made. Boylston, despatched in haste to bear the news of George’s
wounding to the banker, had reported that the utmost Mr. Brant could do
was to write at once to his wife, and arrange for her return to Paris,
since telegrams to the frontier departments travelled more slowly than
letters, and in nine cases out of ten were delayed indefinitely. Campton
had asked no more at the time; but in the last moment before leaving
Paris he remembered having said to Adele Anthony: “You’ll be there when
Julia comes?” and Miss Anthony had nodded back: “At the station.”
The word, it appeared, roused the same memory in both of them; meeting
her eyes, he saw there the Gare de l’Est in the summer morning, the
noisily manœuvring trains jammed with bright young heads, the flowers,
the waving handkerchiefs, and everybody on the platform smiling fixedly
till some particular carriage-window slid out of sight. The scene, at
the time, had been a vast blur to Campton: would he ever again, he
wondered, see anything as clearly as he saw it now, in all its
unmerciful distinctness? He heard the sobs of the girl who had said such
a blithe goodbye to the young _Chasseur Alpin_, he saw her going away,
led by her elderly companion, and powdering her nose at the _laiterie_
over the cup of coffee she could not swallow. And this was what her sobs
had meant....
“This place,” said Mr. Brant, with his usual preliminary cough, “must
be——” He bent over a motor-map, trying to decipher the name; but after
fumbling for his eye-glasses, and rubbing them with a beautifully
monogrammed cambric handkerchief, he folded the map up again and slipped
it into one of the many pockets which honeycombed the interior of the
car. Campton recalled the deathlike neatness of the banker’s private
office on the day when the one spot of disorder in it had been the torn
telegram announcing Benny Upsher’s disappearance.
The motor lowered its speed to make way for a long train of army
lorries. Close upon them clattered a file of gun-wagons, with unshaven
soldiers bestriding the gaunt horses. Torpedo-cars carrying officers
slipped cleverly in and out of the tangle, and motor-cycles, incessantly
rushing by, peppered the air with their explosions.
“This is the sort of thing he’s been living in—living in for months and
months,” Campton mused.
He himself had seen something of the same kind when he had gone to
Châlons in the early days to appeal to Fortin-Lescluze; but at that time
the dread significance of the machinery of war had passed almost
unnoticed in his preoccupation about his boy. Now he realized that for a
year that machinery had been the setting of his boy’s life; for months
past such sights and sounds as these had formed the whole of George’s
world; and Campton’s eyes took in every detail with an agonized avidity.
“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 could 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 deathbed,” 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 stepson; 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 to-day; 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 deeper 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.
XXV
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.”
“Yes—at the very first, I know: it’s always like that. But the first
thing _after_ you began to feel anything?”
He considered, and then said slowly: “The difference.”
“The difference in _him_?”
“In him—in life—in everything.”
Miss Anthony, who understood as a rule, was evidently puzzled. “What
kind of a difference?”
“Oh, a complete difference.” With that she had to be content.
The sense of it had first come to Campton when the bearded man, raising
his lids, looked at him from far off with George’s eyes, and touched
him, very feebly, with George’s hand. It was in the moment of
identifying his son that he felt the son he had known to be lost to him
forever.
George’s lips were moving, and the father laid his ear to them; perhaps
these were last words that his boy was saying.
“Old Dad—in a motor?”
Campton nodded.
The fact seemed faintly to interest George, who continued to examine him
with those distant eyes.
“Uncle Andy’s?”
Campton nodded again.
“Mother——?”
“She’s coming too—very soon.”
George’s lips were screwed into a whimsical smile. “I must have a shave
first,” he said, and drowsed off again, his hand in Campton’s....
* * * * *
“The other gentleman—?” the nurse questioned the next morning.
Campton had spent the night in the hospital, stretched on the floor at
his son’s threshold. It was a breach of rules, but for once the major
had condoned it. As for Mr. Brant, Campton had forgotten all about him,
and at first did not know what the nurse meant. Then he woke with a
start to the consciousness of his fellow-traveller’s nearness. Mr.
Brant, the nurse explained, had come to the hospital early, and had been
waiting below for the last two hours. Campton, almost as gaunt and
unshorn as his son, pulled himself to his feet and went down. In the
hall the banker, very white, but smooth and trim as ever, was patiently
measuring the muddy flags.
“Less temperature this morning,” Campton called from the last flight.
“Oh,” stammered Mr. Brant, red and pale by turns.
Campton smiled haggardly and pulled himself together in an effort of
communicativeness. “Look here—he’s asked for you; you’d better go up.
Only for a few minutes, please; he’s awfully weak.”
Mr. Brant, speechless, stood stiffly waiting to be conducted. Campton
noticed the mist in his eyes, and took pity on him.
“I say—where’s the hotel? Just a step away? I’ll go around, then, and
get a shave and a wash while you’re with him,” the father said, with a
magnanimity which he somehow felt the powers might take account of in
their subsequent dealings with George. If the boy was to live Campton
could afford to be generous; and he had decided to assume that the boy
would live, and to order his behaviour accordingly.
“I—thank you,” said Mr. Brant, turning toward the stairs.
“Five minutes at the outside!” Campton cautioned him, and hurried out
into the morning air through which the guns still crashed methodically.
When he got back to the hospital, refreshed and decent, he was
surprised, and for a moment alarmed, to find that Mr. Brant had not come
down.
“Sending up his temperature, of course—damn him!” Campton raged,
scrambling up the stairs as fast as his stiff leg permitted. But outside
of George’s door he saw a small figure patiently mounting guard.
“I stayed with him less than five minutes; I was merely waiting to thank
you.”
“Oh, that’s all right.” Campton paused, and then made his supreme
effort. “How does he strike you?”
“Hopefully—hopefully. He had his joke as usual,” Mr. Brant said with a
twitching smile.
“Oh, _that_——! But his temperature’s decidedly lower. Of course they may
have to take the ball out of the lung; but perhaps before they do it he
can be moved from this hell.”
The two men were silent, the same passion of anxiety consuming them, and
no means left of communicating it to each other.
“I’ll look in again later. Shall I have something to eat sent round to
you from the hotel?” Mr. Brant suggested.
“Oh, thanks—if you would.”
Campton put out his hand and crushed Mr. Brant’s dry fingers. But for
this man he might not have got to his son in time; and this man had not
once made use of the fact to press his own claim on George. With pity in
his heart, the father, privileged to remain at his son’s bedside,
watched Mr. Brant’s small figure retreating alone. How ghastly to sit
all day in that squalid hotel, his eyes on his watch, with nothing to do
but to wonder and wonder about the temperature of another man’s son!
* * * * *
The next day was worse; so much worse that everything disappeared from
Campton’s view but the present agony of watching, hovering, hanging
helplessly on the words of nurse and doctor, and spying on the glances
they exchanged behind his back.
There could be no thought yet of extracting the bullet; a great surgeon,
passing through the wards on a hasty tour of inspection, had confirmed
this verdict. Oh, to have kept the surgeon there—to have had him at hand
to watch for the propitious moment and seize it without an instant’s
delay! Suddenly the vision which to Campton had been among the most
hideous of all his crowding nightmares—that of George stretched naked on
an operating-table, his face hidden by a chloroform mask, and an orderly
hurrying away with a pile of red towels like those perpetually carried
through the passages below—this vision became to the father’s fevered
mind as soothing as a glimpse of Paradise. If only George’s temperature
would go down—if only the doctors would pronounce him strong enough to
have the bullet taken out! What would anything else matter then? Campton
would feel as safe as he used to years ago, when after the recurring
months of separation the boy came back from school, and he could take
him in his arms and make sure that he was the same Georgie, only bigger,
browner, with thicker curlier hair, and tougher muscles under his
jacket.
What if the great surgeon, on his way back from the front, were to pass
through the town again that evening, reverse his verdict, and perhaps
even perform the operation then and there? Was there no way of
prevailing on him to stop and take another look at George on the return?
The idea took immediate possession of Campton, crowding out his
intolerable anguish, and bringing such relief that for a few seconds he
felt as if some life-saving operation had been performed on himself. As
he stood watching the great man’s retreat, followed by doctors and
nurses, Mr. Brant suddenly touched his arm, and the eyes of the two met.
Campton understood and gasped out: “Yes, yes; we must manage to get him
back.”
Mr. Brant nodded. “At all costs.” He paused, again interrogated
Campton’s eyes, and stammered: “You authorize——?”
“Oh, God—anything!”
“He’s dined at my house in Paris,” Mr. Brant threw in, as if trying to
justify himself.
“Oh, go—_go_!” Campton almost pushed him down the stairs. Ten minutes
later he reappeared, modest but exultant.
“Well?”
“He wouldn’t commit himself, before the others——”
“Oh——”
“But to me, as he was getting into the motor——”
“Well?”
“Yes: if possible. Somewhere about midnight.”
Campton turned away, choking, and stumped off toward the tall window at
the end of the passage. Below him lay the court. A line of stretchers
was being carried across it, not empty this time, but each one with a
bloody burden. Doctors, nurses, orderlies hurried to and fro. Drub,
drub, drub, went the guns, shaking the windows, rolling their fierce din
along the cloudy sky, down the corridors of the hospital and the
pavement of the streets, like huge bowls crashing through story above
story of a kind of sky-scraping bowling alley.
“Even the dead underground must hear them!” Campton muttered.
The word made him shudder superstitiously, and he crept back to George’s
door and opened it; but the nurse, within, shook her head.
“He must sleep after the examination. Better go.”
Campton turned and saw Mr. Brant waiting. A bell rang twelve. The two,
in silence, walked down the stairs, crossed the court (averting their
eyes from the stretchers) and went to the hotel to get something to eat.
* * * * *
Midnight came. It passed. No one in the hurried confused world of the
hospital had heard of the possibility of the surgeon’s returning. When
Campton mentioned it to the nurse she smiled her tired smile, and said:
“He could have done nothing.”
Done nothing! How could she know? How could any one, but the surgeon
himself? Would he have promised if he had not thought there was some
chance? Campton, stretched out on a blanket and his rolled-up coat, lay
through the long restless hours staring at the moonlit sky framed by the
window of the corridor. Great clouds swept over that cold indifferent
vault: they seemed like the smoke from the guns which had not once
ceased through the night. At last he got up, turned his back on the
window, and lay down again facing the stairs. The moonlight unrolled a
white strip along the stone floor. A church-bell rang one ... two ...
there were noises and movements below. Campton raised himself, his heart
beating all over his body. Steps came echoing up.
“Careful!” some one called. A stretcher rounded the stair-rail; another,
and then another. An orderly with a lantern preceded them, followed by
one of the doctors, an old bunched-up man in a muddy uniform, who
stopped furtively to take a pinch of snuff. Campton could not believe
his eyes; didn’t the hospital people know that every bed on that floor
was full? Every bed, that is, but the two in George’s room; and the
nurse had given Campton the hope, the promise almost, that as long as
his boy was so ill she would keep those empty. “I’ll manage somehow,”
she had said.
For a mad moment Campton was on the point of throwing himself in the way
of the tragic procession, barring the threshold with his arms. “What
does this mean?” he stammered to the nurse, who had appeared from
another room with her little lamp.
She gave a shrug. “More casualties—every hospital is like this.”
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
face: 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.
XXVI
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 embedded 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 _communiqués_ 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.
Well—for the moment, at any rate, Campton had the boy to himself. As he
sat there, trying to picture the gradual resurrection of George’s
pre-war face out of the delicately pencilled white mask on the pillow,
he noted the curious change of planes produced by suffering and
emaciation, and the altered relation of lights and shadows. Materially
speaking, the new George looked like the old one seen in the bowl of a
spoon, and through blue spectacles: peaked, narrow, livid, with
elongated nose and sunken eye-sockets. But these altered proportions
were not what had really changed him. There was something in the curve
of the mouth that fever and emaciation could not account for. In that
new line, and in the look of his eyes—the look travelling slowly outward
through a long blue tunnel, like some mysterious creature rising from
the depths of the sea—that was where the new George lurked, the George
to be watched and lain in wait for, patiently and slowly puzzled out....
He reopened his eyes.
“Adele too?”
Campton had learned to bridge over the spaces between the questions.
“No; not this time. We tried, but it couldn’t be managed. A little
later, I hope——”
“She’s all right?”
“Rather! Blooming.”
“And Boylston?”
“Blooming too.”
George’s lids closed contentedly, like doors shutting him away from the
world.
It was the first time since his operation that he had asked about any of
his friends, or had appeared to think they might come to see him. But
his mind, like his stomach, could receive very little nutriment at a
time; he liked to have one mouthful given to him, and then to lie
ruminating it in the lengthening intervals between his attacks of pain.
Each time he asked for news of any one his father wondered what name
would next come to his lips. Even during his delirium he had mentioned
no one but his parents, Mr. Brant, Adele Anthony and Boylston; yet it
was not possible, Campton thought, that these formed the circumference
of his life, that some contracted fold of memory did not hold a nearer
image, a more secret name.... The father’s heart beat faster, half from
curiosity, half from a kind of shy delicacy, at the thought that at any
moment that name might wake in George and utter itself.
Campton’s thoughts again turned to his wife. With Julia there was never
any knowing. Ten to one she would send the boy’s temperature up. He was
thankful that, owing to the difficulty of getting the news to her, and
then of bringing her back from a frontier department, so many days had
had to elapse.
But when she arrived, nothing, after all, happened as he had expected.
She had put on her nurse’s dress for the journey (he thought it rather
theatrical of her, till he remembered how much easier it was to get
about in any sort of uniform); but there was not a trace of coquetry in
her appearance. As a frame for her haggard unpowdered face the white
coif looked harsh and unbecoming; she reminded him, as she got out of
the motor, of some mortified Jansenist nun from one of Philippe de
Champaigne’s canvases.
Campton led her to George’s door, but left her there; she did not appear
to notice whether or not he was following her. He whispered: “Careful
about his temperature; he’s very weak,” and she bent her profile
silently as she went in.
XXVII
George, that evening, seemed rather better, and his temperature had not
gone up: Campton had to repress a movement of jealousy at Julia’s having
done her son no harm. Her experience as a nurse, disciplining a vague
gift for the sickroom, had developed in her the faculty of self-command:
before the war, if George had met with a dangerous accident, she would
have been more encumbering than helpful.
Campton had to admit the change, but it did not draw them any nearer.
Her manner of loving their son was too different. Nowadays, when he and
Anderson Brant were together, he felt that they were thinking of the
same things in the same way; but Julia’s face, even aged and humanized
by grief, was still a mere mask to him. He could never tell what form
her thoughts about George might be taking.
Mr. Brant, on his wife’s arrival, had judged it discreet to efface
himself. Campton hunted for him in vain in the park, and under the
cloister; he remained invisible till they met at the early dinner which
they shared with the staff. But the meal did not last long, and when it
was over, and nurses and doctors scattered, Mr. Brant again slipped
away, leaving his wife and Campton alone.
Campton glanced after him, surprised. “Why does he go?”
Mrs. Brant pursed her lips, evidently as much surprised by his question
as he by her husband’s withdrawal.
“I suppose he’s going to bed—to be ready for his early start to-morrow.”
“A start?”
She stared. “He’s going back to Paris.”
Campton was genuinely astonished. “Is he? I’m sorry.”
“Oh——” She seemed unprepared for this. “After all, you must see—we can’t
very well ... all three of us ... especially with these nuns....”
“Oh, if it’s only _that_——”
She did not take this up, and one of their usual silences followed.
Campton was thinking that it was all nonsense about the nuns, and
meditating on the advisability of going in pursuit of Mr. Brant to tell
him so. He dreaded the prospect of a long succession of days alone
between George and George’s mother.
Mrs. Brant spoke again. “I was sorry to find that the Sisters have been
kept on here. Are they much with George?”
“The Sisters? I don’t know. The upper nurses are Red Cross, as you saw.
But of course the others are about a good deal. What’s wrong? They seem
to me perfect.”
She hesitated and coloured a little. “I don’t want them to find
out—about the Extreme Unction,” she finally said.
Campton repeated her words blankly. He began to think that anxiety and
fatigue had confused her mind.
She coloured more deeply. “Oh, I forgot—you don’t know. I couldn’t think
of anything but George at first ... and the whole thing is so painful to
me.... Where’s my bag?”
She groped for her reticule, found it in the folds of the cloak she had
kept about her shoulders, and fumbled in it with wrinkled jewelled
fingers.
“Anderson hasn’t spoken to you, then—spoken about Mrs. Talkett?” she
asked suddenly.
“About Mrs. Talkett? Why should he? What on earth has happened?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t see her myself ... I couldn’t ... so he had to. She had
to be thanked, of course ... but it seems to me so dreadful, so very
dreadful ... _our_ boy ... that woman....”
Campton did not press her further. He sat dumbfounded, trying to take in
what she was so obviously trying to communicate, and yet instinctively
resisting the approach of the revelation he foresaw.
“George—_Mrs. Talkett_?” He forced himself to couple the two names,
unnatural as their union seemed.
“I supposed you knew. Isn’t it dreadful? A woman old enough——” She drew
a letter from her bag.
He interrupted her. “Is that letter what you want to show me?”
“Yes. She insisted on Anderson’s keeping it—for you. She said it
belonged to us, I believe.... It seems there was a promise—made the
night before he was mobilised—that if anything happened he would get
word to her.... No thought of _us_!” She began to whimper.
Campton reached out for the letter. Mrs. Talkett—Madge Talkett and
George! That was where the boy had gone then, that last night when his
father, left alone at the Crillon, had been so hurt by his desertion!
That was the name which, in his hours of vigil in the little white room,
Campton had watched for on his son’s lips, the name which, one day,
sooner or later, he would have to hear them pronounce.... How little he
had thought, as he sat studying the mysterious beauty of George’s face,
what a commonplace secret it concealed!
The writing was not George’s, but that of an unlettered French soldier.
Campton, glancing at the signature, recalled it as that of his son’s
orderly, who had been slightly wounded in the same attack as George, and
sent for twenty-four hours to the same hospital at Doullens. He had been
at George’s side when he fell, and with the simple directness often
natural to his class in France he told the tale of his lieutenant’s
wounding, in circumstances which appeared to have given George great
glory in the eyes of his men. They thought the wound mortal; but the
orderly and a stretcher-bearer had managed to get the young man into the
shelter of a little wood. The stretcher-bearer, it turned out, was a
priest. He had at once applied the consecrated oil, and George, still
conscious, had received it “with a beautiful smile”; then the orderly,
thinking all was over, had hurried back to the fighting, and been
wounded. The next day he too had been carried to Doullens; and there,
after many enquiries, he had found his lieutenant in the same hospital,
alive, but too ill to see him.
He had contrived, however, to see the nurse, and had learned from her
that the doctors had not given up hope. With that he had to be content;
but before returning to his base he had hastened to fulfill his
lieutenant’s instructions (given “many months earlier”) by writing to
tell “his lady” that he was severely wounded, but still alive—“which is
a good deal in itself,” the orderly hopefully ended, “not to mention his
receiving the Legion of Honour.”
Campton laid the letter down. There was too much to be taken in all at
once; and, as usual in moments of deep disturbance, he wanted to be
alone, above all wanted to be away from Julia. But Julia held him with
insistent eyes.
“Do you want this?” he asked finally, pushing the letter toward her.
She recoiled. “Want it? A letter written to that woman? No! I should
have returned it at once—but Anderson wouldn’t let me.... Think of her
forcing herself upon me as she did—and making you paint her portrait! I
see it all now. Had you any idea this was going on?”
Campton shook his head, and perceived by her look of relief that what
she had resented above all was the thought of his being in a secret of
George’s from which she herself was excluded.
“Adele didn’t know either,” she said, with evident satisfaction. Campton
remembered that he had been struck by Miss Anthony’s look of sincerity
when he had asked her if she had any idea where George had spent his
last evening, and she had answered negatively. This recollection made
him understand Mrs. Brant’s feeling of relief.
“Perhaps, after all, it’s only a flirtation—a mere sentimental
friendship,” he hazarded.
“A flirtation?” Mrs. Brant’s Mater Dolorosa face suddenly sharpened to
worldly astuteness. “A sentimental friendship? Have you ever heard
George mention her name—or make any sort of allusion to such a
friendship?”
Campton considered. “No. I don’t remember his ever speaking of her.”
“Well, then——” Her eyes had the irritated look he had seen on the
far-off day when he had thrown Beausite’s dinner invitation into the
fire. Once more, they seemed to say, she had taken the measure of his
worldly wisdom.
George’s silence—his care not even to mention that the Talketts were so
much as known to him—certainly made it look as though the matter went
deep with him. Campton, recalling the tone of the Talkett drawing-room
and its familiars, had an even stronger recoil of indignation than
Julia’s; but he was silenced by a dread of tampering with his son’s
privacy, a sense of the sacredness of everything pertaining to that
still-mysterious figure in the white bed upstairs.
Mrs. Brant’s face had clouded again. “It’s all so dreadful—and this
Extreme Unction too! What is it exactly, do you know? A sort of baptism?
Will the Roman Church try to get hold of him on the strength of it?”
Campton remembered with a faint inward amusement that, in spite of her
foreign bringing-up, and all her continental affinities, Julia had
remained as implacably and incuriously Protestant as if all her life she
had heard the Scarlet Woman denounced from Presbyterian pulpits. At
another time it would have amused him to ponder on this one streak in
her of the ancestral iron; but now he wanted only to console her.
“Oh, no—it was just the accident of the priest’s being there. One of our
chaplains would have done the same kind of thing.”
She looked at him mistrustfully. “The same kind of thing? It’s never the
same with them! Whatever they do reaches ahead. I’ve seen such advantage
taken of the wounded when they were too weak to resist ... didn’t know
what they were saying or doing....” Her eyes filled with tears. “A
priest and a woman—I feel as if I’d lost my boy!”
The words went through Campton like a sword, and he sprang to his feet.
“Oh, for God’s sake be quiet—don’t say it! What does anything matter but
that he’s alive?”
“Of course, of course ... I didn’t mean.... But that he should think
only of _her_, and not of us ... that he should have deceived us ...
about everything ... everything....”
“Ah, don’t say that either! Don’t tempt Providence! If he deceived us,
as you call it, we’ve no one but ourselves to blame; you and I,
and—well, and Brant. Didn’t we all do our best to make him deceive
us—with our intriguing and our wire-pulling and our cowardice? How he
despised us for it—yes, thank God, how he despised us from the first! He
didn’t hide the truth from Boylston or Adele, because they were the only
two on a level with him. And _they_ knew why he’d deceived us; they
understood him, they abetted him from the first.” He stopped, checked by
Mrs. Brant’s pale bewildered face, and the eyes imploringly lifted, as
if to ward off unintelligible words.
“Ah, well, all this is no use,” he said; “we’ve got him safe, and it’s
more than we deserve.” He laid his hand on her shoulder. “Go to bed;
you’re dead-beat. Only don’t say things—things that might wake up the
Furies....”
He pocketed the letter and went out in search of Mr. Brant, followed by
her gaze of perplexity.
The latter was smoking a last cigar as he paced up and down the cloister
with upturned coat-collar. Silence lay on the carefully darkened
building, crouching low under an icy sea-fog; at intervals, through the
hush, the waves continued to mimic the booming of the guns.
Campton drew out the orderly’s letter. “I hear you’re leaving to-morrow
early, and I suppose I’d better give this back,” he said.
Mr. Brant had evidently expected him. “Oh, thanks. But Mrs. Talkett says
she has no right to it.”
“No right to it? That’s a queer thing to say.”
“So I thought. I suppose she meant, till you’d seen it. She was
dreadfully upset ... till she saw me she’d supposed he was dead.”
Campton shivered. “She sent this to your house?”
“Yes; the moment she got it. It was waiting there when my—when Julia
arrived.”
“And you went to thank her?”
“Yes.” Mr. Brant hesitated. “Julia disliked to keep the letter. And I
thought it only proper to take it back myself.”
“Certainly. And—what was your impression?”
Mr. Brant hesitated again. He had already, Campton felt, reached the
utmost limit of his power of communicativeness. It was against all his
habits to “commit himself.” Finally he said, in an unsteady voice: “It
was impossible not to feel sorry for her.”
“Did she say—er—anything special? Anything about herself and——”
“No; not a word. She was—well, all broken up, as they say.”
“Poor thing!” Campton murmured.
“Yes—oh, yes!” Mr. Brant held the letter, turning it thoughtfully about.
“It’s a great thing,” he began abruptly, as if the words were beyond his
control, “to have such a beautiful account of the affair. George
himself, of course, would never——”
“No, never.” Campton considered. “You must take it back to her,
naturally. But I should like to have a copy first.”
Mr. Brant put a hand in his pocket. “I supposed you would. And I took
the liberty of making two—oh, privately, of course. I hope you’ll find
my writing fairly legible.” He drew two folded sheets from his
note-case, and offered one to Campton.
“Oh, thank you.” The two men grasped hands through the fog.
Mr. Brant turned to continue his round, and Campton went up to the
whitewashed cell in which he was lodged. Screening his candle to keep
the least light from leaking through the shutters, he re-read the story
of George’s wounding, copied out in the cramped tremulous writing of a
man who never took pen in hand but to sign a daily batch of typed
letters. The “hand-made” copy of a letter by Mr. Brant represented
something like the pious toil expended by a monkish scribe on the page
of a missal; and Campton was moved by the little man’s devotion.
As for the letter, Campton had no sooner begun to re-read it than he
entirely forgot that it was a message of love, addressed at George’s
request to Mrs. Talkett, and saw in it only the record of his son’s
bravery. And for the first time he understood that from the moment of
George’s wounding until now he had never really thought of him in
relation to the war, never thought of his judgment on the war, of all
the unknown emotions, resolves and actions which had drawn him so many
months ago from his safe shelter in the Argonne.
These things Campton, unconsciously, had put out of his mind, or rather
had lost out of his mind, from the moment when he had heard of George’s
wounding. By-and-bye, he knew, the sense of them, and of the questions
they raised, would come back and possess him; but meanwhile, emptied of
all else, he brimmed with the mere fact of George’s bodily presence,
with the physical signs of him, his weakness, his temperature, the pain
in his arm, the oppression on his lung, all the daily insistent details
involved in coaxing him slowly back to life.
The father could bear no more; he put the letter away, as a man might
put away something of which his heart was too full to measure it.
Later—yes; now, all he knew was that his son was alive.
* * * * *
But the hour of Campton’s entering into glory came when, two or three
days later, George asked with a sudden smile: “When I exchanged
regiments I did what you’d always hoped I would, eh, Dad?”
It was the first allusion, on the part of either, to the mystery of
George’s transit from the Argonne to the front. At Doullens he had been
too weak to be questioned, and as he grew stronger, and entered upon the
successive stages of his convalescence, he gave the impression of having
travelled far beyond such matters, and of living his real life in some
inconceivable region from which, with that new smile of his, he
continued to look down unseeingly on his parents. “It’s exactly as if he
were dead,” the father thought. “And if he were, he might go on watching
us with just such a smile.”
And then, one morning as they were taking a few steps on a sunny
terrace, Campton had felt the pressure of the boy’s sound arm, and
caught the old George in his look.
“I ... good Lord ... at any rate I’m glad you felt sure of me,” Campton
could only stammer in reply.
George laughed. “Well—rather!”
There was a long silence full of sea-murmurs, too drowsy and indolent,
for once, to simulate the horror of the guns.
“I—I only wish you’d felt you could trust me about it from the first, as
you did Adele and Boylston,” the father continued.
“But, my dear fellow, I did feel it! I swear I did! Only, you see, there
was mother. I thought it all over, and decided it would be easier for
you both if I said nothing. And, after all, I’m glad now that I
didn’t—that is, if you really do understand.”
“Yes; I understand.”
“That’s jolly.” George’s eyes turned from his and rested with a joyful
gravity on the little round-faced Sister who hurried up to say that he’d
been out long enough. Campton often caught him fixing this look of
serene benevolence on the people who were gradually repeopling his
world, a look which seemed to say that they were new to him, yet dimly
familiar. He was like a traveller returning after incommunicable
adventures to the place where he had lived as a child; and, as happens
with such wanderers, the trivial and insignificant things, the things a
newcomer would not have noticed, seemed often to interest him most of
all.
He said nothing more about himself, but with the look of recovered
humanness which made him more lovable if less remotely beautiful, began
to question his father.
“Boylston wrote that you’d begun to paint again. I’m glad.”
“Oh, I only took it up for a while last spring.”
“Portraits?”
“A few. But I chucked it. I couldn’t stand the atmosphere.”
“What atmosphere?”
“Of people who could want to be painted at such a time. People who
wanted to ‘secure a Campton.’ Oh, and then the dealers—God!”
George seemed unimpressed. “After all, life’s got to go on.”
“Yes—that’s what they say! And the only result is to make me doubt if
_theirs_ has.”
His son laughed, and then threw off: “You did Mrs. Talkett?”
“Yes,” Campton snapped, off his guard.
“She’s a pretty creature,” said George; and at that moment his eyes,
resting again on the little nurse, who was waiting at his door with a
cup of cocoa, lit up with celestial gratitude.
“The _communiqué’s_ good to-day,” she cried; and he smiled at her
boyishly. The war was beginning to interest him again: Campton was sure
that every moment he could spare from that unimaginable region which his
blue eyes guarded like a sword was spent among his comrades at the
front.