Edith Wharton

“ Their look had just such a vividness as George’s own; as their glances crossed, Campton saw the same light in the eyes of all three. And now, a few weeks later, the clue to it came to him in Boylston’s new word. Preparedness! America, it appeared, had caught it up from east to west, in that sudden incalculable way she had of flinging herself on a new idea; from a little group of discerning spirits the contagion had spread like a prairie fire, sweeping away all the other catchwords of the hour, devouring them in one great blaze of wrath and enthusiasm. America meant to be prepared! ”

“ Neither George nor the old woman had heard Campton enter; and for a moment he stood and watched them. George’s face, so fair and ruddy against Mme. Lebel’s rusty black, wore a look of boyish compassion which Campton had never seen on it. Mme. Lebel had sunk into his hold as if it soothed and hushed her; and Campton said to himself: “These two are closer to each other than George and I, because they’ve both seen the horror face to face. He knows what to say to her ever so much better than he knows what to say to his mother or me.” ”

“ That was the view that war made mothers take of the chief blessing they could ask for their children! Campton understood her, and took the same view. George’s wonderful recovery, the one joy his parents had shared in the last twenty years, was now a misfortune to be denied and dissembled. They looked at each other like accomplices, the same thought in their eyes: if only the boy had been born in America! It was grotesque that the whole of joy or anguish should suddenly be found to hang on a geographical accident.
“After all, we’re Americans; this is not our job—” Campton began. ”

“ He was more and more taking George and his safety for granted, as a solid standing-ground from which to reach out a hand to the thousands struggling in the depths. As long as the world’s fate was in the balance it was every man’s duty to throw into that balance his last ounce of brain and muscle. Campton wondered how he had ever thought that an accident of birth, a remoteness merely geographical, could justify, or even make possible, an attitude of moral aloofness. Harvey Mayhew’s reasons for wishing to annihilate Germany began to seem less grotesque than his own for standing aside. ”

“ Everything that was dearest to him, the thought of George, the vision of the lad dying upstairs, was defiled by this monstrous coupling of their names with that of the supple middle-aged adventurer safe in his spotless uniform at the War Office. And beneath the boiling-up of Campton’s disgust a new fear lifted its head. How did Mme. de Dolmetsch know about George? And what did she know? Evidently there had been foolish talk somewhere. Perhaps it was Mrs. Brant—or perhaps Fortin himself. All these great doctors forgot the professional secret with some one woman, if not with many. ”

“ He was as much interested in the suppliant’s tale as in watching Boylston’s way of listening. That modest and commonplace-looking young man was beginning to excite a lively curiosity in Campton. It was not only that he remembered George’s commendation, for he knew that the generous enthusiasms of youth may be inspired by trifles imperceptible to the older. It was Boylston himself who interested the painter. He knew no more of the young man than the scant details Miss Anthony could give. Boylston, it appeared, was the oldest hope of a well-to-do Connecticut family. ”

“ It amused Campton to do Mrs. Talkett against such a background: her thin personality needed to be filled out by the visible results of its many quests and cravings. There were people one could sit down before a blank wall, and all their world was there, in the curves of their faces and the way their hands lay in their laps; others, like Mrs. Talkett, seemed to be made out of the reflection of what surrounded them, as if they had been born of a tricky grouping of looking-glasses, and would vanish if it were changed. ”

“ No one seemed to feel any longer that life is something more than being alive; apparently the only people not tired of the thought of death were the young men still pouring out to it in their thousands.
Still those thousands poured; still the young died; still, wherever Campton went, he met elderly faces, known and unknown, disfigured by grief, shrunken with renunciation. And still the months wore on without result.
One day in crossing the Tuileries he felt the same soft sparkle which, just about a year earlier, had abruptly stirred the sap in him. ”

“ Brant’s private office was as glitteringly neat as when Campton had entered it for the first time, and seen the fatal telegram about Benny Upsher marring the order of the desk.
Now he crossed the threshold with different feelings. To have Mr. Brant look up and smile, to shake hands with him, accept one of his cigars, and sink into one of the blue leather armchairs, seemed to be in the natural order of things. He felt only the relief of finding himself with the one person likely to understand. ”

“ Brant’s parched cheek was suffused with a flush of understanding. Then, as if frightened at the consequences of such complicity, he repeated his bow and went out.
When Campton issued forth into the Avenue Marigny, it came to him as a surprise to see the old unheeding life of Paris still going on. In the golden decline of day the usual throng of idlers sat under the horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysées, children scampered between turf and flowers, and the perpetual stream of motors rolled-up the central avenue to the restaurants beyond the gates. ”

“ Since his talk with Adamson he could not bring himself to be seriously alarmed. Fear had taken him by the throat for a moment in the station, at the sound of the girl’s sobs; but already he had thrown it off. Everybody agreed that the war was sure to be over in a few weeks; even Dastrey had come round to that view; and with Fortin’s protection, and the influences Anderson Brant could put in motion, George was surely safe—as safe at his depot as anywhere else in this precarious world. Campton poured out Adele’s coffee, and drank off his own as if it had been champagne. ”

“ Campton saw now that it was true of poor Madge Talkett, as it was of Adele Anthony and Mr. Brant, and even in a measure of Julia. They had never—no, not even George’s mother—had anything, in the close inextricable sense in which Campton had had his son. And it was only now, in his own hour of destitution, that he understood how much greater the depth of their poverty had been. He recalled the frightened embarrassed look of the young lieutenant whom he had discountenanced by his tears; and he said to himself: “The only thing that helps is to be able to do things for people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A poor little country pledged to a guaranteed neutrality could hardly be expected to hold her frontiers more than forty-eight hours against the most powerful army in Europe. And what a narrow strip Belgium was, viewed as an outpost of France!
These thoughts, racing through Campton’s mind, were swept out of it again by his absorbing preoccupation. What effect would the Belgian affair have on George’s view of his own participation in the war? For the first time the boy’s feelings were visibly engaged; his voice shook as he burst out: “Louis Dastrey’s right: this kind of thing has got to stop. ”

“ If I can’t convince you, ask Boylston—ask Adele!”
George sat staring down at the table. For the first time since they had met at Doullens Campton was conscious of reaching his son’s inner mind, and of influencing it.
“I wonder if you really love her?” he suddenly risked.
The question did not seem to offend George, scarcely to surprise him. “Of course,” he said simply. “Only—well, everything’s different nowadays, isn’t it? So many of the old ideas have come to seem such humbug. That’s what I want to drag her out of—the coils and coils of stale humbug. They were killing her.” ”

“ Mme. Lebel answered with simplicity.
Campton went up apprehensively. The idea of unknown persons in possession of his studio always made him nervous. Whoever they were, whatever errands they came on, they always—especially women—disturbed the tranquil course of things, faced him with unexpected problems, unsettled him in one way or another. Bouncing in on people suddenly was like dynamiting fish: it left him with his mind full of fragments of dismembered thoughts.
As he entered he perceived from the temperate atmosphere that Mme. Lebel had not only opened the studio but made up the fire. ”

“ Campton made a movement of refusal, and Mr. Brant, overwhelmed, thrust the cigar-case away.
“I ought to have taken one—I may need him,” Campton thought; and Mrs. Brant said, addressing her husband: “He thinks as we do—exactly.”
Campton winced. Thinking as the Brants did was, at all times, so foreign to his nature and his principles that his first impulse was to protest. But the sight of Mr. Brant, standing there helplessly, and trying to hide the twitching of his lip by stroking his lavender-scented moustache with a discreetly curved hand, moved the painter’s imagination. ”

“ You’ve broken my beautiful world! There’ll be splinters....” Ah, yes, splinters, splinters ... everybody’s hands were red with them! What retribution devised by man could be commensurate with the crime of destroying his beautiful world? Campton sat down to the task of collating office files.
His bell rang, and he started up, as much surprised as if the simplest events had become unusual. It would be natural enough that Dastrey or Boylston should drop in—or even Adele Anthony—but his heart beat as if it might be George. He limped to the door, and found Mrs. Talkett. ”

“ As Campton had felt from the first, there was nothing left for them to say to each other. If young men like Louis Dastrey must continue to be sacrificed by hundreds of thousands to save their country, for whom was the country being saved? Was it for the wasp-waisted youths in sham uniforms who haunted the reawakening hotels and restaurants, in the frequent intervals between their ambulance trips to safe distances from the front? ”

“ This sort of thing couldn’t go on,” he said, in the words of Mme. Lebel.
He was to start in an hour, and Campton excused himself for intruding on the family, who seemed as happily united, as harmonious in their deeper interests, as if no musical studio-parties and exotic dancers had ever absorbed the master of the house.
Campton, looking at the group, felt a pang of envy, and thought, for the thousandth time, how frail a screen of activity divided him from depths of loneliness he dared not sound. “‘For every man hath business and desire,’” he muttered as he followed the physician. ”

“ The Seine too had ceased to live: only a single orange gleam, low on the water’s edge, undulated on the jetty waves like a streamer of seaweed.
The two Americans left Dastrey at his Ministry, and the painter strolled on to Boylston’s lodging before descending to the underground railway. He, whom his lameness had made so heavy and indolent, now limped about for hours at a time over wet pavements and under streaming skies: these midnight tramps had become a sort of expiatory need to him. ”

“ He had been an early recruit of Plattsburg, and his military training was so far advanced that he counted on being among the first officers sent to the fighting line. He was a fresh-coloured lad, with fair hair that stood up in a defiant crest.
“There are so few of us, and there’s so little time to lose; they can’t afford to be too particular,” he laughed.
It was just the sort of thing that George would have said, and the laugh was like an echo of George’s. At the sound Campton suddenly burst into tears, and was aware of his visitor’s looking at him with eyes of dismay and compassion. ”

“ Campton saw each one go with a fresh pang, knowing that every move brought them so much nearer to the front, that ever-ravening and inexorable front. They were always happy to be gone; and that only increased his pain. Now and then he attached himself more particularly to one of the young men, because of some look of the eyes or some turn of the mind like George’s; and then the parting became anguish. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In Campton the stirring of the sap had been a cold and languid process, chiefly felt in his reluctance to go on with his relief work. He had tried to close his ears to the whispers of his own lassitude, vexed, after the first impulse of self-dedication, to find that no vocation declared itself, that his task became each day more tedious as well as more painful. Theoretically, the pain ought to have stimulated him: perpetual immersion in that sea of anguish should have quickened his effort to help the poor creatures sinking under its waves. ”

“ No one at the rear had really known, except in swift fitful flashes, about the individual suffering of the first months of the war; now such information was systematized and distributed everywhere, daily, with a cold impartial hand. And every night, when one laid one’s old bones on one’s bed, there were those others, the young in their thousands, lying down, perhaps never to rise again, in the mud and blood of the trenches.
Even Boylston’s Preparedness was beginning to get on Campton’s nerves. He tried to picture to himself how he should exult when his country at last fell into line ”