# A Son at the Front/Chapter 36

XXXVI
Ggeorge's prediction had come true. At his funeral, three days afterward, Boylston, a new-fledged member of the American Military Mission, was already in uniform. . .
​But through what perversity of attention did the fact strike Campton, as he stood, a blank unfeeling automaton, in the front pew behind that coffin draped with flags and flanked with candle-glitter? Why did one thing rather than another reach to his deadened brain, and mostly the trivial things, such as Boylston's being already in uniform, and poor Julia's nose, under the harsh crape, looking so blue-red without its powder, and the chaplain's asking "O grave, where is thy victory?" in the querulous tone of a schoolmaster reproaching a pupil who mislaid things? It was always so with Campton: when sorrow fell it left him insensible and dumb. Not till long afterward did he begin to feel its birth-pangs. . .
They first came to him, those pangs, on a morning of the following July, as he sat once more on the terrace of the Tuileries. Most of his time, during the months since George's death, had been spent in endless aimless wanderings up and down the streets of Paris: and that day, descending early from Montmartre, he had noticed in his listless way that all the buildings on his way were fluttering with American flags. The fact left him indifferent: Paris was always decorating nowadays for one ally or another. Then he remembered that it must be the Fourth of July; but the idea of the Fourth of July came to him, through the same haze of indifference, as a mere far-off childish memory of surreptitious ​explosions and burnt fingers. He strolled on toward the Tuileries, where he had got into the way of sitting for hours at a time, looking across the square at what had once been George's window.
He was surprised to find the Rue de Rivoli packed with people; but his only thought was the instinctive one of turning away to avoid them, and he began to retrace his steps in the direction of the Louvre. Then at a corner he paused again and looked back at the Place de la Concorde. It was not curiosity that drew him, heaven knew—he would never again be curious about anything—but he suddenly remembered the day three months earlier when, leaning from George's window in the hospital, he had said to himself "By the time our first regiments arrive he'll be up and looking at them from here, or sitting with me over there on the terrace"; and that decided him to turn back. It was as if he had felt the pressure of George's hand on his arm.
Though it was still so early he had some difficulty in pushing his way through the throng. No seats were left on the terrace, but he managed to squeeze into a corner near one of the great vases of the balustrade; and leaning there, with the happy hubbub about him, he watched and waited.
Such a summer morning it was—and such a strange grave beauty had fallen on the place! He seemed to understand for the first time—he who had served Beauty all his days—how profoundly, at certain hours, ​it may become the symbol of things hoped for and things died for. All those stately spaces and raying distances, witnesses of so many memorable scenes, might have been called together just as the setting for this one event—the sight of a few brown battalions passing over them like a feeble trail of insects.
Campton, with a vague awakening of interest, glanced about him, studying the faces of the crowd. Old and young, infirm and healthy, civilians and soldiers—ah, the soldiers!—all were exultant, confident, alive. Alive! The word meant something new to him now—something so strange and unnatural that his mind still hung and brooded over it. For now that George was dead, by what mere blind propulsion did all these thousands of human beings keep on mechanically living?
He became aware that a boy, leaning over intervening shoulders, was trying to push a folded paper into his hand. On it was pencilled, in Mr. Brant's writing: "There will be a long time to wait. Will you take the seat I have kept next to mine?" Campton glanced down the terrace, saw where the little man sat at its farther end, and shook his head. Then some contradictory impulse made him decide to get up, laboriously work his halting frame through the crowd, and insert himself into the place next to Mr. Brant. The two men nodded "without shaking hands; after that they sat silent, their eyes on the empty square. Campton ​noticed that Mr. Brant wore his usual gray clothes, but with a mourning band on the left sleeve. The sight of that little band irritated Campton. . .
There was, as Mr. Brant had predicted, a long interval of waiting; but at length a murmur of jubilation rose far off, and gathering depth and volume came bellowing and spraying up to where they sat. The square, the Champs Elysées and all the leafy distances were flooded with it: it was as though the voice of Paris had sprung up in fountains out of her stones. Then a military march broke shrilly on the tumult; and there they came at last, in a scant swaying line—so few, so new, so raw; so little, in comparison with the immense assemblages familiar to the place, so much in meaning and in promise.
"How badly they march—there hasn't even been time to drill them properly!" Campton thought; and at the thought he felt a choking in his throat, and his sorrow burst up in him in healing springs. . .
It was after that day that he first went back to his work. He had not touched paint or pencil since George's death; now he felt the inspiration and the power returning, and he began to spend his days among the young American officers and soldiers, studying them, talking to them, going about with them, and then hurrying home to jot down his impressions. He had not, as yet, looked at his last study of George, or opened ​the portfolio with the old sketches; if any one had asked him, he would probably have said that they no longer interested him. His whole creative faculty was curiously, mysteriously engrossed in the recording of the young faces for whose coming George had yearned.
"It's their marching so badly—it's their not even having had time to be drilled!" he said to Boylston, half-shamefacedly, as they sat together one August evening in the studio window.
Campton seldom saw Boylston nowadays. All the young man's time was taken up by his job with the understaffed and inexperienced Military Mission; but fagged as he was by continual overwork and heavy responsibilities, his blinking eyes had at last lost their unsatisfied look, and his whole busy person radiated hope and encouragement.
On the day in question he had turned up unexpectedly, inviting himself to dine with Campton and smoke a cigar afterward in the quiet window overhanging Paris. Campton was glad to have him there; no one could tell him more than Boylston about the American soldiers, their numbers, the accommodations prepared for their reception, their first contact with the other belligerents, and their own view of the business they were about. And the two chatted quietly in the twilight till the young man, rising, said it was time to be off.
"Back to your shop?"
​"Rather! There's a night's work ahead. But I'm as good as new after our talk."
Campton looked at him wistfully. "You know I'd like to paint you some day."
"Oh———" cried Boylston, suffused with blushes; and added with a laugh: "It's my uniform, not me."
"Well, your uniform is you—it's all of you young men."
Boylston stood in the window twisting his cap about undecidedly. "Look here, sir—now that you've got back to work again———"
"Well?" Campton interrupted suspiciously.
The young man cleared his throat and spoke with a rush. "His mother wants most awfully that something should be decided about the monument."
"Monument? What monument? I don't want my son to have a monument," Campton exploded.
But Boylston stuck to his point. "It'll break her heart if something isn't put on the grave before long. It's five months now—and they fully recognize your right to decide———"
"Damn what they recognize! It was they who brought him to Paris; they made him travel when he wasn't fit; they killed him."
"Well—supposing they did: judge how much more they must be suffering!"
"Let 'em suffer. He's my son—my son. He isn't Brant's."
​"Miss Anthony thinks———"
"And he's not hers either, that I know of!"
Boylston seemed to hesitate. "Well, that's just it, isn't it, sir? You've had him; you have him still. Nobody can touch that fact, or take it from you. Every hour of his life was yours. But they've never had anything, those two others, Mr. Brant and Miss Anthony; nothing but a reflected light. And so every outward sign means more to them. I'm putting it badly, I know———"
Campton held out his hand. "You don't mean to, I suppose. But better not put it at all. Good night," he said. And on the threshold he called out sardonically: "And who's going to pay for a monument, I'd like to know?"
A monument—they wanted a monument! Wanted him to decide about it, plan it, perhaps design it—good Lord, he didn't know! No doubt it all seemed simple enough to them: anything did, that money could buy. . . When he couldn't yet bear to turn that last canvas out from the wall, or look into the old portfolio even. . . Suffering, suffering! What did they any of them know about suffering? Going over old photographs, comparing studies, recalling scenes and sayings, discussing with some sculptor or other the shape of George's eyelids, the spring of his chest-muscles, the way his hair grew and his hands moved—why, it ​was like digging him up again out of that peaceful corner of the Neuilly cemetery where at last he was resting, like dragging him back to the fret and the fever, and the senseless roar of the guns that still went on.
And then: as he'd said to Boylston, who was to pay for their monument? Even if the making of it had struck him as a way of getting nearer to his boy, instead of building up a marble wall between them—even if the idea had appealed to him, he hadn't a penny to spare for such an undertaking. In the first place, he never intended to paint again for money; never intended to do anything but these gaunt and serious or round and babyish young American faces above their stiff military collars, and when their portraits were finished to put them away, locked up for his own pleasure; and what he had earned in the last years was to be partly for these young men—for their reading-rooms, clubs, recreation centres, whatever was likely to give them temporary rest and solace in the grim months to come; and partly for such of the protégés of "The Friends of French Art" as had been deprived of aid under the new management. Tales of private jealousy and petty retaliation came to Campton daily, now that Mme. Beausite administered the funds; Adele Anthony and Mile. Davril, bursting with the wrongs of their pensioners, were always appealing to him for help. And then, hidden behind these more or less valid ​reasons, the old instinctive dread of spending had reasserted itself, he couldn't tell how or why, unless through some dim opposition to the Brants' perpetual outpouring: their hospitals, their motors, their bribes, their orchids, and now their monument—their monument!
He sought refuge from it all with his soldiers, haunting for hours every day one of the newly-opened Soldiers' and Sailors' Clubs. Adele Anthony had already found a job there, and was making a success of it. She looked twenty years older since George was gone, but she stuck to her work with the same humorous pertinacity; and with her mingled heartiness and ceremony, her funny resuscitation of obsolete American slang, and her ability to answer all their most disconcerting questions about Paris and France (Montmartre included), she easily eclipsed the ministering angels who twanged the home-town chord and called them "boys."
The young men appeared to return Campton's liking; it was as if they had guessed that he needed them, and wanted to offer him their shy help. He was conscious of something rather protecting in their attitude, of his being to them a vague unidentified figure, merely "the old gentleman" who was friendly to them; but he didn't mind. It was enough to sit and listen to their talk, to try and clear up a few of the countless puzzles which confronted them, to render them such fatherly ​services as he could, and in the interval to jot down notes of their faces—their inexhaustibly inspiring faces. Sometimes to talk with them was like being on the floor in George's nursery, among the blocks and the tin soldiers; sometimes like walking with young archangels in a cool empty heaven; but wherever he was he always had the sense of being among his own, the sense he had never had since George's death.
To think of them all as George's brothers, to study out the secret likeness to him in their young dedicated faces: that was now his one passion, his sustaining task; it was at such times that his son came back and sat among them. . .
Gradually, as the weeks passed, the first of his new friends, officers and soldiers, were dispersed throughout the training camps, and new faces succeeded to those he had tried to fix on his canvas; an endless line of Benny Upshers, baby-Georges, schoolboy Boylstons, they seemed to be. 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.
One day a second lieutenant came to the studio to ​take leave. 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.
"Oh, don't, sir, don't" the young man pleaded, wringing the painter's hand, and making what decent haste he could to get out of the studio.
Campton, left alone, turned once more to his easel. He sat down before a canvas on which he had blocked out a group of soldiers playing cards at their club; but after a stroke or two he threw aside his brush, and remained with his head bowed on his hands, a lonely tired old man.
He had kept a cheerful front at his son's going; and now he could not say goodbye to one of these young fellows without crying. Well—it was because he had no one left of his own, he supposed. Loneliness like his took all a man's strength from him. . .
The bell rang, but he did not move. It rang again; ​then the door was pushed timidly open, and Mrs. Talkett came in. He had not seen her since the day of George’s funeral, when he had fancied he detected her in a shrunken black-veiled figure hurrying past in the meaningless line of mourners.
In her usual abrupt fashion she began, without a greeting: "I’ve come to say goodbye; I’m going to America."
He looked at her remotely, hardly hearing what she said. "To America?"
"Yes; to join my husband."
He continued to consider her in silence, and she frowned in her perplexed and fretful way. "He’s at Plattsburg, you know." Her eyes wandered unseeingly about the studio. "There’s nothing else to do, is there—now—here or anywhere? So I sail to-morrow; I mean to take a house somewhere near him. He’s not well, and he writes that he misses me. The life in camp is so unsuited to him———"
Campton still listened absently. "Oh, you’re right to go," he agreed at length, supposing it was what she expected of him.
"Am I?" She half-smiled. "What’s right and what’s wrong? I don’t know any longer. I’m only trying to do what I suppose George would have wanted." She stood uncertainly in front of Campton. "All I do know," she cried, with a sharp break in her voice, "is that I’ve never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!" ​And she threw herself down on the divan in a storm of desolate sobbing.
After he had comforted her as best he could, and she had gone away, Campton continued to wander up and down the studio forlornly. That cry of hers kept on echoing in his ears: "I've never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!" It associated itself suddenly with a phrase of Boylston's that he had brushed away unheeding: "You've had your son—you have him still; but those others have never had anything."
Yes; 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. I suppose that's why Brant's always trying———"
Julia too: it was strange that his thoughts should turn to her with such peculiar pity. It was not because the boy had been born of her body: Campton did not see her now, as he once bad in a brief moment ​of compassion, as the young mother bending illumined above her baby. He saw her as an old empty-hearted woman, and asked himself how such an unmanageable monster as grief was to fill the room up of her absent son.
What did such people as Julia do with grief, he wondered, how did they make room for it in their lives, get up and lie down every day with its taste on their lips? Its elemental quality, that awful sense it communicated of a whirling earth, a crumbling Time, and all the cold stellar spaces yawning to receive us—these feelings which he was beginning to discern and to come to terms with in his own way (and with the sense that it would have been George's way too), these feelings could never give their stern appeasement to Julia. . . Her religion? Yes, such as it was no doubt it would help; talking with the Rector would help; giving more time to her church-charities, her wounded soldiers, imagining that she was paying some kind of tax on her affliction. But the vacant evenings, at home, face to face with Brant! Campton had long since seen that the one thing which had held the two together was their shared love of George; and if Julia discovered, as she could hardly fail to do, how much more deeply Brant had loved her son than she had, and how much more inconsolably he mourned him, that would only increase her sense of isolation. And so, in sheer self-defence, she would gradually, stealthily, fill up the ​void with the old occupations, with bridge and visits and secret consultations at the dressmaker's about the width of crape on her dresses; and all the while the object of life would be gone for her. Yes; he pitied Julia most of all.
But Mr. Brant too—perhaps in a different way it was he who suffered most. For the stellar spaces were not exactly Mr. Brant's native climate, and yet voices would call to him from them, and he would not know. . .
There were moments when Campton looked about him with astonishment at the richness of his own denuded life; when George was in the sunset, in the voices of young people, or in any trivial joke that father and son would have shared; and other moments when he was nowhere, utterly lost, extinct and irrecoverable; and others again when the one thing which could have vitalized the dead business of living would have been to see him shove open the studio door, stalk in, pour out some coffee for himself in his father's cup, and diffuse through the air the warm sense of his bodily presence, the fresh smell of his clothes and his flesh and his hair. But through all these moods, Campton began to see, there ran the life-giving power of a reality embraced and accepted. George had been; George was; as long as his father's consciousness lasted, George would be as much a part of it as the closest, most actual of his immediate sensations. He had missed noth​ing of George, and here was his harvest, his golden harvest.
Such states of mind were not constant with Campton; but more and more often, when they came, they swept him on eagle wings over the next desert to the next oasis; and so, gradually, the meaningless days became linked to each other in some kind of intelligible sequence.
Boylston, after the talk which had so agitated Campton, did not turn up again at the studio for some time; but when he next appeared the painter, hardly pausing to greet him, began at once, as if they had just parted: "That monument you spoke about the other day . . . you know. . ."
Boylston glanced at him in surprise.
"If they want me to do it, I'll do it," Campton went on, jerking the words out abruptly and walking away toward the window. He had not known, till he began, that he had meant to utter them, or how difficult they would be to say; and he stood there a moment struggling with the unreasoning rebellious irritability which so often lay in wait for his better impulses. At length he turned back, his hands in his pockets, clinking his change as he had done the first time that Boylston had come to him for help. "But as I plan the thing," he began again, in a queer growling tone, "it's going to cost a lot—everything of the sort does nowadays, ​especially in marble. It's hard enough to get any one to do that kind of work at all. And prices have about tripled, you know."
Boylston's eyes filled, and he nodded, still without speaking.
"That's just what Brant'll like though, isn't it?" Campton said, with an irrepressible sneer in his voice. He saw Boylston redden and look away, and he too flushed to the forehead and broke off ashamed. Suddenly he had the vision of Mr. Brant effacing himself at the foot of the hospital-stairs when they had arrived at Doullens; Mr. Brant drawing forth the copy of the orderly's letter in the dark fog-swept cloister; Mr. Brant always yielding, always holding back, yet always remembering to do or to say the one thing the father's lacerated soul could bear.
"And he's had nothing—nothing—nothing!" Campton thought.
He turned again to Boylston, his face still flushed, his lips twitching. "Tell them—tell Brant—that I'll design the thing; I'll design it, and he shall pay for it. He'll want to—I understand that. Only, for God's sake, don't let him come here and thank me—at least not for a long time!"
Boylston again nodded silently, and turned to go.
After he had gone the painter moved back to his long table. He had always had a fancy for modelling—had always had lumps of clay lying about within ​reach. He pulled out all the sketches of his son from the old portfolio, spread them before him on the table, and began.
Paris, 1918—Saint Brice-Sous-Forêt, 1922.
THE END