# A Son at the Front/Chapter 35

XXXV
Campton once more stood leaning in the window of a Paris hospital.
Before him, but viewed at another angle, was spread that same great spectacle of the Place de la Concorde that he had looked down at from the Crillon on the eve of mobilisation; behind him, in a fresh white bed, George lay in the same attitude as when his father had stood in the door of his room and sketched him while he slept.
All day there had run through Campton's mind the clairvoyante's promise to Julia: "Your son will come back soon, and will never be sent to the front again."
Ah, this time it was true—never, never would he be sent to the front again! They had him fast now, had him safe. That was the one certainty. Fast how,
​safe how?—the answer to that had long hung in the balance. For two weeks or more after his return the surgeons had hesitated. Then youth had seemed to conquer, and the parents had been told to hope that after a long period of immobility George's shattered frame would slowly re-knit, and he would walk again—or at least hobble. A month had gone by since then; and Campton could at last trust himself to cast his mind back over the intervening days, so like in their anguish to those at Doullens, yet so different in all that material aid and organization could give.
Evacuation from the base, now so systematically and promptly effected, had become a matter of course in all but the gravest cases; and even the delicate undertaking of deflecting George's course from the hospital near the front to which he had been destined, and bringing him to Paris, had been accomplished by a word in the right quarter from Mr. Brant.
Campton, from the first, had been opposed to the attempt to bring George to Paris; partly perhaps because he felt that in the quiet provincial hospital near the front he would be able to have his son to himself. At any rate, the journey would have been shorter; though, as against that, Paris offered more possibilities of surgical aid. His opposition had been violent enough to check his growing friendliness with the Brants; and at the hours when they came to see George, Campton now most often contrived to be absent.
​Well, at any rate, George was alive, he was there under his father's eye, he was going to live: there seemed to be no doubt about it now. Campton could think it all over slowly and even calmly, marvelling at the miracle and taking it in. . . So at least he had imagined till he first made the attempt; then the old sense of unreality enveloped him again, and he struggled vainly to clutch at something tangible amid the swimming mists. "George———George———George———" He used to say the name over and over below his breath, as he sat and watched at his son's bedside; but it sounded far off and hollow, like the voice of a ghost calling to another.
Who was "George"? What did the name represent? The father left his post in the window and turned back to the bed, once more searching the boy's face for enlightenment. But George's eyes were closed: sleep lay on him like an impenetrable veil. The sleep of ordinary men was not like that: the light of their daily habits continued to shine through the chinks of their closed faces. But with these others, these who had been down into the lower circles of the pit, it was different: sleep instantly and completely sucked them back into the unknown. There were times when Campton, thus watching beside his son, used to say to himself: "If he w T ere dead he could not be farther from me"—so deeply did George seem plunged in secret traffic with things unutterable.
​Now and then Campton, sitting beside him, seemed to see a little way into those darknesses; but after a moment he always shuddered back to daylight, benumbed, inadequate, weighed down with the weakness of the flesh and the incapacity to reach beyond his habitual limit of sensation. "No wonder they don't talk to us," he mused.
By-and-bye, perhaps, when George was well again, and the war over, the father might penetrate into his son's mind, and find some new ground of communion with him: now the thing was not to be conceived.
He recalled again Adele Anthony's asking him, when he had come back from Doullens: "What was the first thing you felt?" and his answering: "Nothing.". . . Well, it was like that now: every vibration had ceased in him. Between himself and George lay the unbridgeable abyss of his son's experiences.
As he sat there, the door was softly opened a few inches and Boylston's face showed through the crack: light shot from it like the rays around a chalice. At a sign from him Campton slipped out into the corridor and Boylston silently pushed a newspaper into his grasp. He bent over it, trying with dazzled eyes to read sense into the staring head-lines: but "America—America—America———" was all that he could see.
A nurse came gliding up on light feet: the tears were running down her face. "Yes—I know, I know, I ​know!" she exulted. Up the tall stairs and through the ramifying of long white passages rose an unwonted rumour of sound, checked, subdued, invisibly rebuked, but ever again breaking out, like the noise of ripples on a windless beach. In every direction nurses and orderlies were speeding from one room to another of the house of pain with the message: "America has declared war on Germany."
Campton and Boylston stole back into George's room. George lifted his eyelids and smiled at them, understanding before they spoke.
"The sixth of April! Remember the date!" Boylston cried over him in a gleeful whisper.
The wounded man, held fast in his splints, contrived to raise his head a little. His eyes laughed back into Boylston's. "You'll be in uniform within a week!" he said; and Boylston crimsoned.
Campton turned away again to the window. The day had come—had come; and his son had lived to see it. So many of George's comrades had gone down to death without hope; and in a few months more George, leaning from that same window—or perhaps well enough to be watching the spectacle with his father from the terrace of the Tuileries—would look out on the first brown battalions marching across the Place de la Concorde, where father and son, in the early days of the war, had seen the young recruits of the Foreign Legion patrolling under improvised flags.
​At the thought Campton felt a loosening of the tightness about his heart. Something which had been confused and uncertain in his relation to the whole long anguish was abruptly lifted, giving him the same sense of buoyancy that danced in Boylston's glance. At last, random atoms that they were, they seemed all to have been shaken into their places, pressed into the huge mysterious design which was slowly curving a new firmament over a new earth. . .
There was another knock; and a jubilant nurse appeared, hardly visible above a great bunch of lilacs tied with a starred and striped ribbon. Campton, as he passed the flowers over to his son, noticed an envelope with Mrs. Talkett's perpendicular scrawl. George lay smiling, the lilacs close to his pillow, his free hand fingering the envelope; but he did not unseal the letter, and seemed to care less than ever to talk.
After an interval the door opened again, this time to show Mr. Brant's guarded face. He drew back slightly at the sight of Campton; but Boylston, jumping up, passed close to the painter to breathe: "To-day, sir, just to-day—you must!"
Campton went to the door and signed silently to Mr. Brant to enter. Julia Brant stood outside, flushed and tearful, carrying as many orchids as Mrs. Talkett had sent lilacs. Campton held out his hand, and with an embarrassed haste she stammered: "we couldn't ​wait———" Behind her he saw Adele Anthony hurriedly coming up the stairs.
For a few minutes they all stood or sat about George's bed, while their voices, beginning to speak low, rose uncontrollably, interrupting one another with tears and laughter. Mr. Brant and Boylston were both brimming with news, and George, though he listened more than he spoke, now and then put a brief question which loosened fresh floods. Suddenly Campton noticed that the young man's face, which had been too flushed, grew pale; but he continued to smile, and his eyes to move responsively from one illuminated face to the other. Campton, seeing that the others meant to linger, presently rose and slipping out quietly walked across the Rue de Rivoli to the deserted terrace of the Tuileries. There he sat for a long time, looking out on the vast glittering spaces of the Place de la Concorde, and calling up, with his painter's faculty of vivid and precise visualization, a future vision of interminable lines of brown battalions marching past.
When he returned to the hospital after dinner the night-nurse met him. She was not quite as well satisfied with her patient that evening: hadn't he perhaps had too many visitors? Yes, of course—she knew it had been a great day, a day of international rejoicing, above all a blessed day for France. But the doctors, from the beginning, must have warned Mr. Campton that his son ought to be kept quiet—very quiet. The ​last operation had been a great strain on his heart. Yes, certainly, Mr. Campton might go in; the patient had asked for him. Oh, there was no danger—no need for anxiety; only he must not stay too long; his son must try to sleep.
Campton nodded, and stole in.
George lay motionless in the shaded lamplight: his eyes were open, but they seemed to reflect his father's presence without any change of expression, like mirrors rather than like eyes. The room was doubly silent after the joyful hubbub of the afternoon. The nurse had put the orchids and lilacs where George's eyes could rest on them. But was it on the flowers that his gaze so tranquilly dwelt? Or did he see in their place the faces of their senders? Or was he again in that far country whither no other eyes could follow him?
Campton took his usual seat by the bed. Father and son looked at each other, and the old George glanced out for half a second between the wounded man's lids.
"There was too much talking to-day," Campton grumbled.
"Was there? I didn't notice," his son smiled.
No—he hadn't noticed; he didn't notice anything. He was a million miles away again, whirling into his place in the awful pattern of that new firmament. . .
"Tired, old man?" Campton asked under his breath.
"No; just glad," said George contentedly.
​His father laid a hand on his and sat silently beside him while the spring night blew in upon them through the open window. The quiet streets grew quieter, the hush in their hearts seemed gradually to steal over the extinguished city. Campton kept saying to himself: "I must be off," and still not moving. The nurse was sure to come back presently—why should he not wait till she dismissed him?
After a while, seeing that George's eyes had closed, Campton rose, and crept across the room to darken the lamp with a newspaper. His movement must have roused his son, for he heard a slight struggle behind him and the low cry: "Father!"
Campton turned and reached the bed in a stride. George, ashy-white, had managed to lift himself a little on his free elbow.
"Anything wrong?" the father cried.
"No; everything all right," George said. He dropped back, his lids closing again, and a single twitch ran through the hand that Campton had seized. After that he lay stiller than ever.