# A Son at the Front/Chapter 9

IX
George was gone.
When, with a last whistle and scream, his train had ploughed its way out of the clanging station; when the last young figures clinging to the rear of the last carriage had vanished, and the bare rails again glittered up from the cindery tracks, Campton turned and looked about him.
All the platforms of the station were crowded as he had seldom seen any place crowded, and to his surprise he found himself taking in every detail of the scene with a morbid accuracy of observation. He had discovered, during these last days, that his artist's vision had been strangely unsettled. Sometimes, as when he had left Fortin's house, he saw nothing: the material world, which had always tugged at him with a thousand hands, vanished and left him in the void. Then again, as at present, he saw everything, saw it too clearly, in all its superfluous and negligible reality, instead of instinctively selecting, and disregarding what was not to his purpose.
Faces, faces—they swarmed about him, and his overwrought vision registered them one by one. Especially he noticed the faces of the women, women of all ages, all classes. These were the wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, mistresses of all those heavily laden trainfuls of French youth. He was struck with ​the same strong cheerfulness in all: some pale, some flushed, some serious, but all firmly and calmly smiling.
One young woman in particular his look dwelt on—a dark girl in a becoming dress—both because she was so pleasant to see, and because there was such assurance in her serenity that she did not have to constrain her lips and eyes, but could trust them to be what she wished. Yet he saw by the way she clung to the young artilleryman from whom she was parting that hers were no sisterly farewells.
An immense hum of voices filled the vast glazed enclosure. Campton caught the phrases flung up to the young faces piled one above another in the windows-words of motherly admonishment, little jokes, tender names, mirthful allusions, last callings out: "Write often! Don't forget to wrap up your throat. . . Remember to send a line to Annette. . . Bring home a Prussian helmet for the children! On les aura, pas, mon vieux?" It was all bright, brave and confident. "If Berlin could only see it!" Campton thought.
He tried to remember what his own last words to George had been, but could not; yet his throat felt dry and thirsty, as if he had talked a great deal. The train vanished in a roar, and he leaned against a pier to let the crowd flood by, not daring to risk his lameness in such a turmoil.
Suddenly he heard loud sobs behind him. He turned, ​and recognized the hat and hair of the girl whose eyes had struck him. He could not see them now, for they were buried in her hands and her whole body shook with woe. An elderly man was trying to draw her away—her father, probably.
"Come, come, my child———"
"Oh—oh—oh," she hiccoughed, following blindly.
The people nearest stared at her, and the faces of other women grew pale. Campton saw tears on the cheeks of an old body in a black bonnet who might have been his own Mme. Lebel. A pale lad went away weeping.
But they were all afraid, then, all in immediate deadly fear for the lives of their beloved! The same fear grasped Campton's heart, a very present terror, such as he had hardly before imagined. Compared to it, all that he had felt hitherto seemed as faint as the sensations of a looker-on. His knees failed him, and he grasped a transverse bar of the pier.
People were leaving the station in groups of two or three who seemed to belong to each other; only he was alone. George's mother had not come to bid her son goodbye; she had declared that she would rather take leave of him quietly in her own house than in a crowd of dirty people at the station. But then it was impossible to conceive of her being up and dressed and at the Gare de l'Est at five in the morning—and how could she have got there without her motor? So ​Campton was alone, in that crowd which seemed all made up of families.
But no—not all. Ahead of him he saw one woman moving away alone, and recognized, across the welter of heads, Adele Anthony's adamantine hat and tight knob of hair.
Poor Adele! So she had come too—and had evidently failed in her quest, not been able to fend a way through the crowd, and perhaps not even had a glimpse of her hero. The thought smote Campton with compunction: he regretted his sneering words when they had last met, regretted refusing to dine with her. He wished the barrier of people between them had been less impenetrable; but for the moment it was useless to try to force a way through it. He had to wait till the crowd shifted to other platforms, whence other trains were starting, and by that time she was lost to sight.
At last he was able to make his way through the throng, and as he came out of a side entrance he saw her. She appeared to be looking for a taxi—she waved her sunshade aimlessly. But no one who knew the Gare de l'Est would have gone around that corner to look for a taxi; least of all the practical Adele. Besides, Adele never took taxis: she travelled in the bowels of the earth or on the dizziest omnibus tops.
Campton knew at once that she was waiting for him. He went up to her and a guilty pink suffused her nose. ​"You missed him after all———?" he said.
"I—oh, no, I didn't."
"You didn't? But I was with him all the time. We didn't see you———"
"No, but I saw—distinctly. That was all I went for," she jerked back.
He slipped his arm through hers. "This crowd terrifies me. I'm glad you waited for me," he said.
He saw her pleasure, but she merely answered: "I'm dying of thirst, aren't you?"
"Yes—or hunger, or something. Could we find a laiterie?"
They found one, and sat down among early clerks and shop-girls, and a few dishevelled women with swollen faces whom Campton had noticed in the station. One of them, who sat opposite an elderly man, had drawn out a pocket mirror and was powdering her nose.
Campton hated to see women powder their noses—one of the few merits with which he credited Julia Brant was that of never having adopted these dirty modern fashions, of continuing to make her toilet in private "like a lady," as people used to say when he was young. But now the gesture charmed him, for he had recognized the girl who had been sobbing in the station.
"How game she is! I like that. But why is she so frightened?" he wondered. For he saw that her choco​late was untouched, and that the smile had stiffened on her lips.
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.
"Do you know anything about the people George was dining with last night?" he enquired abruptly.
Miss Anthony knew everything and everybody in the American circle in Paris; she was a clearing-house of Franco-American gossip, and it was likely enough that if George had special reasons for wishing to spend his last evening away from his family she would know why. But the chance of her knowing what had been kept from him made Campton's question, as soon as it was put, seem indiscreet, and he added hastily: "Not that I want———"
She looked surprised. "No: he didn't tell me. Some young man's affair, I suppose. . . " She smirked absurdly, her lashless eyes blinking under the pushed-back veil.
​Campton's mind had already strayed from the question. Nothing bored him more than Adele doing the "sad dog," and he was vexed at having given her such a chance to be silly. What he wanted to know was whether George had spoken to his old friend about his future—about his own idea of his situation, and his intentions and wishes in view of the grim chance which people, with propitiatory vagueness, call "anything happening." Had the boy left any word, any message with her for any one? But it was useless to speculate, for if he had, the old goose, true as steel, would never betray it by as much as a twitch of her lids. She could look, when it was a question of keeping a secret, like such an impenetrable idiot that one could not imagine any one's having trusted a secret to her.
Campton had no wish to surprise George's secrets, if the boy had any. But their parting had been so hopelessly Anglo-Saxon, so curt and casual, that he would have liked to think his son had left, somewhere, a message for him, a word, a letter, in case . . . in case there was anything premonitory in the sobbing of that girl at the next table.
But Adele's pink nose confronted him, as guileless as a rabbit's, and he went out with her unsatisfied. They parted at the door of the restaurant, and Campton went to the studio to see if there were any news of his maid-servant Mariette. He meant to return to sleep there that night, and even his simple house​keeping was likely to be troublesome if Mariette should not arrive.
On the way it occurred to him that he had not yet seen the morning papers, and he stopped and bought a handful.
Negotiations, hopes, fears, conjectures—but nothing new or definite, except the insolent fact of Germany's aggression, and the almost-certainty of England's intervention. When he reached the studio he found Mme. Lebel in her usual place, paler than usual, but with firm lips and bright eyes. Her three grandsons had left for their depots the day before: one was in the Chasseurs Alpins, and probably already on his way to Alsace, another in the infantry, the third in the heavy artillery; she did not know where the two latter were likely to be sent. Her eldest son, their father, was dead; the second, a man of fifty, and a cabinetmaker by trade, was in the territorials, and was not to report for another week. He hoped, before leaving, to see the return of his wife and little girl, who were in the Ardennes with the wife's people. Mme. Lebel's mind was made up and her philosophy ready for immediate application.
"It's terribly hard for the younger people; but it had to be. I come from Nancy, Monsieur: I remember the German occupation. I understand better than my daughter-in-law. . . "
There was no news of Mariette, and small chance of having any for some days, much less of seeing her. ​Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/115 ​Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/116 ​Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/117 ​Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/118 ​Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/119 ​"Then you don't see your way to getting me into George's regiment?" Benny simply replied.
An hour later Campton still seemed to see him standing there, with obstinate soft eyes repeating the same senseless question. It cost him an effort to shake off the vision.
He returned to the Crillon to collect his possessions. On his table was a telegram, and he seized it eagerly, wondering if by some mad chance George's plans were changed, if he were being sent back, if Fortin had already arranged something. . .
He tore open the message, and read: "Utica July thirty-first. No news from Benny please do all you can to facilitate his immediate return to America dreadfully anxious your cousin Madeline Upsher."
"Good Lord!" Campton groaned—"and I never even asked the boy's address!"