BOOK III
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 criss-cross of confused telephone-calls from the Embassy, the Préfecture 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 step-son; 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.