 Chapter 19 of A Sun at the Front This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org recording by Chad from Ballyclair. A Sun at the Front by Edith Wharton. Chapter 19 One day, Madame LeBelle said, The first horse chestnuts are in bloom, and Monsure must really buy himself some new shirts. Camden looked at her in surprise. She spoke in a different voice. He wondered if she had had good news of her grandchildren. Then he saw that the furrows in her old face were as deep as ever, and that the change in her voice was simply an unconscious response to the general stirring of sap. The spring need to go on living through everything and in spite of everything. Also, there are reasons as Madame LeBelle would have said, Life had to go on, and new shirts had to be bought. No one knew why it was necessary, but everyone felt that it was, and here were the horse chestnuts, once more actively confirming it. Habit laid its compelling grasp on the wires of the per-broken marionettes with which the furies had been playing, and they responded, though with feebler flabbings, to the accustomed jerk. In Camden, 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. The woe of the war had had that effect on Adele Antony, the young Bolston, and Marmzele Davril, on the greater number of his friends, but their order left him cold. He wanted to help. He wanted it. He was sure as earnestly as they, but the longing was not an inspiration to him, and he felt more and more that to work listlessly was to work ineffectually. I gave the poor devils so many boots and many orders a day. You give them yourself, and so does Bolston, he complained to Miss Antony, who murmured, ah, Bolston, as if that point of the remark were alone worth noticing. At his age too, it's extraordinary, the way the boys got out of them himself, or into himself rather, he was a puttering boy before. Now he's a man with a man's sense of things. Yes, but his patience, his way of getting into their minds, their prejudices, their meannesses, their miseries. He doesn't seem to me like the kind who was meant to be a missionary. Not a bit of it, but he's burnt up with shame at our not being in the war as all the young Americans are. Camden made an impatient movement. Benny Upshire again, can we let our government decide all that for us? What else did we elect it for? I wonder, I wonder, echoed Miss Antony. Talks of this kind were irritating and unprofitable, and Camden did not again raise the question. Miss Antony's vision was too simplifying to penetrate far into his doubts, and after nearly a year's incessant contact with the most savage realities, her mind still seemed at ease in its old formulas. Simplicity, after all, was the best safeguard in such hours. Mrs. Brunt was as absorbed in her task as Adele Antony. Since the Brunt Villa at Duville had been turned into a hospital, she was always on the road. In a riffle-gent, new motor, emplacent, with a red cross, carrying supplies, rushing down with great surgeons, hurrying back to committee meetings and conferences with the service de Saint. For she and Mr. Brunt were now among the leaders in American relief work in Paris, and throwing open the Avenue Marine. Drawing rooms for concerts, lectures, and such super philanthropic gaieties, a society was beginning to countenance. On a day when Madame Lebel told Camden that the horse chestnuts were emblosing and he must buy some new shirts, he was particularly in need of such incentives. He had made up his mind to go see Mrs. Brunt about a concert for the Friends of French Art, which was to be held in her house. Ever since George had asked him to see something of his mother, Camden had used the pretext of charitable collaboration as the best way of getting over their fundamental lack of anything to say to each other. The appearance of the Jean-Elise confirmed Madame Lebel's announcement. Everywhere, the perpetual rosy spikes were rising above unfolded green and Camden, looking up at them, remembered once, thinking how nature had adapted herself to the scene in overhanging with her own pink lamps and green fans, the lamps and fans of the café, Jean-Ton Benith. The latter lights had long since been extinguished. The fans folded up and as he passed the bent and broken arches of electric light, the arched chairs and dead plants in paintless boxes all heat up like the scenery of a bankrupt theatre. He felt the pang of nature's obstinate renewal in a world of death. Yet he also felt the stir of the blossoming trees in the form of a more restless discontent, a duller despair, a new sense of inadequacy. How could war go on when spring had come? Mrs. Brunt, having regressed her household and given over her drawing rooms to charity, received in her boudoir a small room contrived by a clever upholsterer to stimulate a seclusion of which she had never felt the need. Photographs strewed the low tables and facing the door, Campton saw George's last portrait in uniform enclosed in an expensive frame. Campton had received the same photograph and thrust it into a drawer. He thought a young man on a safe staff job rather ridiculous in uniform and at the same time the site filled him with a secret dread. Mrs. Brunt was bidding goodbye to a lady in mourning whom Campton did not know. His approach through the carpeted anti-chamber had been unnoticed. And as he entered the room, he heard Mrs. Brunt say in French, apparently in reply to a remark of her visitor, Bridge, Cher, Madame. No, not yet. I confess, I haven't the courage to take up my old life. We mothers with sons at the front. Ah, exclaimed the other lady. There I don't agree with you. I think one owes it to them to go on as if one were as little afraid as they are. That is what all my sons prefer, even, she added. Lowering her voice but lifting her head higher. Even, I'm sure, the one who is buried by the morn. With a flush on her handsome face, she pressed Mrs. Brunt's hand and passed out. Mrs. Brunt had caught sight of Campton as she received the rebuke. Her colour rose slightly and she said with a smile, so many women can't get on without amusement. No, he agreed. There was a pause and then he asked, who was it? The Marquis de Trône. The widow. Where are the sons she spoke of? There are three left. One in Chaucerre, Alpui, the youngest who volunteered at 17 in the artillery in Argynon. The third badly wounded in hospital at Compogne. And the eldest killed. I simply can't understand. Why, Campton interrupted, did you speak as if George were at the front? Do you usually speak of him in that way? Her silence and her deepening flush made him feel the unkindness of the question. I didn't mean, forgive me, he said. Only sometimes when I see women like that, I'm well, she questioned. He was silent in his turn and she did not insist. They sat facing each other, each forgetting the purpose of their meeting. For the 100th time, he felt the uselessness of trying to carry out George's filial injunction between himself and George's mother. These months of fiery trials seemed to have list instead of tightening the links. He wandered back to Montmartre through the bereft and beautiful city. The light lay on it in wide silvery washes, harmonising the grey stone, the pale foliage and the sky piled with clouds, which seemed to rebuild in translucent, masses the monuments below. He caught himself once more viewing the details of the scene in the terms of his trade. River, pavements, terraces, heavy with trees, the whole crowded skyline from Notre-Dame to the Pantheon, instead of presenting himself in their bare reality, were transposed into a painter's vision. And the faces around him became again the starting point of rapid, incessant combinations of line and colour, as if the visible world were once more at its old trick of weaving itself into magic designs. The reawakening of this instinct deepened captain's sense of unrest and made him feel more than ever unfitted for a life in which such things were no longer of account, in which it seemed a disloyalty even to think of them. He returned to the studio, having promised to deal with some office work which he had carried home the night before. The papers lay on the table, but he turned to the window and looked out over his budding lilacs at the new strange Paris. He remembered that it was almost a year since he had leaned in the same place, gazing down on the wise and frivolous old city in her summer, Désirée, while he planned his journey to Africa with George. And something George had once quoted from Faust came drifting through his mind. Take care, 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 this beautiful world. Camden 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 Dastry or Bolston 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. Tulkett. She said, hey, I come in and did so without waiting for an answer. The rapidity of her entrance surprised him less than the change in her appearance, but for the one glimpse of her dishevelled elegance when she had rushed into Mrs. Brandt's drawing room on the day after war was declared. He had seen her only in a nursing uniform as absorbed in her work as if it had been a long-thwarted vocation. Now she stood before him in raiment so delicately spring-like that it seemed an emanation of the day. Care had dropped from her with her professional guard and she smiled as though he must guess the reason. In ordinary times, he would have thought she's in love, but that explanation was one which seemed to belong to other days. It reminded him, however, how little he knew of Mrs. Tulkett who, after Renee Der Ryls' death, had vanished from his life as abruptly as she had entered it. Allusions to the Tulkets picked up now and again at Adele Anthony's, led him to conjecture an invisible husband in the background, but all he knew of Mrs. Tulkett was what she had told him of her artistic yearnings of what he had been able to divine from her empty questioning eyes, from certain sweet inflections when she spoke of her wounded soldiers and from the precise and finished language with which she clothed her unfinished and imprecise thoughts. All these indications made up an image not unlike that of the fashion plate torn from its context of which she had reminded him at the first meeting and he looked at her with indifference wondering why she had come with an abrupt gesture. She pulled the pin from her heavily plumbed hat, tossed it to the divan and said, Dear Master, I just want to sit with you and have you talk to me. She dropped down beside her head, clasped her thin hands about her thin knee and broke out as if she had already forgotten that she wanted him to talk to her. Do you know I've made up my mind to begin to live again, to live my own life? I mean to be my real me. After all these dreadful months of exile from myself, I see now that that is my real duty, just as it is yours, just as it is that of every artist and every creature. Don't you feel as I do? Don't you agree with me? We must save beauty for the world. Before it is too late, we must save it out of this awful wreck and ruin. It sounds ridiculously presumptuous, doesn't it, to say we in talking of a great genius like you and a poor little speck of dust like me. But after all, there is the same instinct in us, the same craving, the same desire to realise beauty, though you do it so magnificently and so, so objectively. And I, she paused, unclasped her hands and lifted her lovely bewildered eyes. I do it only by a ribbon in my hair, a flower in a vase, a way of living a curtain or placing a lacquer screen in the right light. But I oughtn't to be ashamed of my limitations. Do you think I ought? Surely everyone ought to be helping to save beauty. Everyone is needed, even the humblest and most ignorant of us, or else the world will be all death and ugliness. And after all, ugliness is the only real death, isn't it? To drew a deep breath and added, it has done me good already to sit here and listen to you. Camden, a few weeks previously, would have been amused or perhaps merely irritated, but in the interval he had become aware in himself of the same irresistible craving to live as she put it. And as he had heard it formulate it, that very day, by the morning mother who had so sharply rebuked Mrs. Brunt, the spring was stirring them all in their different ways, secreting in them the sap, which craved to burst into bridge parties or the painting of masterpieces or a consciousness of the need for new shirts. But what am I in all this? Mrs. Togut rushed on, sparing him the trouble of a reply, nothing but the match that lights the flame. Sometimes I imagine that I might put what I mean into poetry. I have scribbled a few things, you know, but that's not what I was going to tell you. It's you, dear master, who must set us the example of getting back to our work, our real work, whatever it is. What have you done in all these dreadful months? The real you, nothing, and the world will be the poorer for it ever after. Master, you must paint again. You must begin today. Campton gave an uneasy laugh. Oh, paint. He waved his hand toward the office files of the friends of French Art. There's my work, not the real you. It's your dummy's work, just as my nursing has been mine. Oh, one did one's best, but all the while beauty and art and the eternal things were perishing. And what will the world be like without them? I shan't be here, Campton growled. But your son will. She looked at him profoundly. You know I know your son, we're friends. And I'm sure he will feel as I feel. He would tell you to go back to your painting. For months past, any allusion to George had put Campton on his guard, stiffening him with impoverished defences. But this appeal of Mrs. Tolkots found him unprepared, demoralised by the spring sweetness and by his secret ease of his son's connivance with it. What was war? Any war but an old European disease, an ancestral blood madness seizing on the first pretext to slake its frenzy. Campton reminded himself again that he was the son of free institutions of a country in no way responsible for the centuries of sinister diplomacy, which had brought Europe to reign and was now trying to drag down America. George was right, the Brant's were right, this young woman through whose lips Campton's own secret instinct spoke was right. He was silent so long that she rose with the anxious frown that appeared to be her way of blushing. And flattered out, I'm boring you, I'd better go. She picked up her hat and held its cataract of feathers poised above her slanted head. Wait, let me do you like that, Campton cried. It had never before occurred to him that she was paintable, but as she stood there with uplift arm, the long line flowing from her wrist to her hip suddenly wind itself about him like a net. Me, she stammered standing motionless as if frightened by the excess of her triumph. Do you mind, he queried and hardly hearing her flattered out mind, when it was just what I came for. He dragged forth an easel, flung it on the first canvas he could lay hands on, though he knew it was the wrong shape and size and find himself instantly transported into the lost world, which was the only real one. End of chapter 19, recording by Chad from Bully Clare. Chapter 20 of A Sun At The Front. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org recording by Chad Horner. A Sun At The Front by Edith Wharton. Chapter 20, for a month, Campton painted on in transcendent bliss. His first stroke carried him out of space and time into a region where all that had become numbed and atrophied in him could expand and breathe. Lines, images, colors were again the sole facts. He plunged into their whirling circles like a stranded sea creature into the sea. Once more, every face was not a vague hieroglyph, that curtain drawn before an invisible aggregate of wands and bows, but a work of art, a flower in a pattern to be dealt with on its own merits like a bronze or a jill. During the first day or two, his hand halted. The sense of insufficiency was a good and he fought with his subject till he felt a strange ease in every renovated muscle and his model became like a musical instrument on which he played with careless mastery. He had transferred his easel to Mrs. Tuckett's apartment. It was an odd patchwork place, full of bold beginnings and doubtful pauses, rash surrenders to the newest fashions and abrupt insurrections against him, where Lewis Philip Mahogany had entrenched itself against the aggression of art nouveau hangings and the frail grace of 18th century armchairs, shed derision on lumpy modern furniture painted like hobby horses at a fair. It amused Camden to do Mrs. Tuckett's 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 for 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. Tuckett seemed to be made out of the reflection of what surrounded them as if they had been born of a tricky gripping of looking glasses and would vanish if it were changed. At first, Camden was steeped in the mere sensual joy of his art. But after a few days, the play of the mirrors began to interest him. Mrs. Tuckett had abandoned her hospital work and was trying, as she said, to recreate herself. In this, she was aided by a number of people who struck Camden as rather too young not to have found some other job or too old to care any longer for that particular one. But all this did not trouble his newly recovered serenity. He seemed to himself some high like a drowned body, but drowned in a toy aquarium, still staring about with living eyes but aware of the other people, only as shapes swimming by with a flash of exotic fins. They were enclosed together, all of them, in an unreal luminous sphere, mercifully screened against the reality from which a common impulse of horror had driven them. And since he was among them, it was not his business to wonder at the others. So, through the cloud of his art, he looked out on them impartially. The high priestess of the group was Madame Di Dolmets with Harvey Mayhew as her acolyte. Mr. Mayhew was still in pursuit of atrocities. He was in fact almost the only member of the group who did not rather obstinately disavow the obligation to carry on. But he had discovered that to discharge this secret task, he must vary it by frequent intervals of relaxation. He explained to Campton that he had found it to be his duty to rest, and he was indefatigable in the performance of duty. He had therefore, with an expenditure of eloquence, which Campton thought surprisingly slight, persuaded Bolston to become his understudy and devote several hours a day to the whirling activities of the shrimp-pink beru of atrocities at the Nouveau Luxe. Campton at first could not understand how the astute Bolston had allowed himself to be drawn into the eddy, but it turned out that Bolston's astuteness had drawn him in. You see, there's an awful lot of money to be got out of it, one way or another. And I know a use for every penny. That is, Miss Anthony and I do. The young man modestly explained, adding in response to the painter's puzzled stare that Mr. Mayhew's harrowing appeals were beginning to bring from America immense sums for the victims, and that Mr. Mayhew, while immensely gratified by the effect of his eloquence and the prestige it was bringing him in French social and governmental circles, had not the cloudiest notion how the funds should be used and had begged Bolston to advise him. It was allowing to this that the ex-delegate to the Hague was able, with a light conscience, to seek the repose of Mrs. Tauquette's company and with a smile of the widest initiation to listen to the subversive conversation of her familiars. Subversive was the motto of the group. Everyone was engaged in attacking some theory of art or life or letters, which nobody in particular defended. Even Mr. Tauquette, a kindly young man with eyeglasses and glossy hair who roamed about straightening the furniture like a gentlemanly detective watching the presents at a wedding owned to Captain that he was versive. And on the painter's pressing for a definition added, why I don't believe in anything she doesn't believe in while his eyeglasses shyly followed his wife's course among the tea cups. Madame de Dolmetsch, though obviously anxious to retain her hold on Mr. Mayhew, did not restrict herself to such mild fare but exercised her matchless eyes on a trip of followers. The shock-haired pianist who accompanied her recitations a straight-backed young American diplomatist whose collars seemed a part of his career, a lustrous South American millionaire and a short-squad Sicilian who designed the costumes for the pianists and produced ballads. All these people appeared to believe intensely in each other's reality and importance but it gradually came over, Captain, that all of them accepting their host and hostess knew that they were merely masquerading. To Captain, he used the hard-working world of art. This playing a bohemia seemed a nursery game but the scene acquired an unexpected solidity from the appearance in it one day of the banker, George Einstein, who strolled in as naturally as if he had been dropping into Captain's studio to inquire into the progress of his own portrait. I must come and look you up. Captain, get you to finish me. He said jovially, tapping his fat boot with a Malacca stick as he looked over the painter's head at the canvas on which Mrs. Talkat's restless image seemed to flutter like a butterfly impaled. You'll owe it to me if he does you, the sitter declared, smiling back at the layer which Captain divined behind his shoulder and he felt a sudden pity for her innocence. My wife made Captain come back to his real work, doing his bit, you know, said Mr. Talkat, straightening a curtain and disappearing again like a diving animal. And Mrs. Talkat turned her plaintive eyes on Captain. That kind of idiocy is all I've ever had, they seemed to say and he nearly cried back to her but you poor child, it's the only honest thing anywhere near you. Absorbed in his picture, he hardly stopped to wander at Jordan Stein's reappearance and at his air of bloated satisfaction or his easy allusions to cabinet ministers and eminent statesmen. The atmosphere of the Talkat house was so mirage-like that even the big red bulk of the international financier became imponderable in it. But one day, Captain, on his way home, ran across Dastry and remembered that they had not meant for weeks. The ministerial drudge looked, worn and preoccupied and Captain was abruptly recalled to the world he had been trying to escape from. You seem rather knocked up, what's wrong with you? Dastry stared, wrong with me? Well, did you like the coming you gave this morning? I didn't read it, said Captain, curtly. They walked along a few steps in silence. You see, the painter continued, I've gone back to my job, my painting. I suddenly found I had to. Dastry glanced at him with surprising kindness. Ah, that's good news, my dear fellow. You think so, Captain, half sneered? Of course, why not? What are you painting? May I come and see? Naturally, Captain paused. The fact is, I was bitten the other day with a desire to depict that little willow the wisp of a Mrs. Tauquette. Come to her house any afternoon and I'll show you the thing. To her house, Dastry paused with a frown. Then the picture's finished. No, not by a long way. I'm doing it there in her milieu among her crowd. It amuses me. They amuse me. When will you come? He shot out the sentences like challenges and his friend took them up in the same tone. To Mrs. Tauquette, to meet her crowd. Thanks, I'm too much tied down by my job. No, you're not. You're too disapproving, said Captain, quarrelsomely. You think we're all a lot of shirks of drones of international loafers. I don't know what you call us, but I'm one of them. So whatever name you give them, I must answer to. Well, I'll tell you what they are, my dear fellow. And I'm not ashamed to be among them. They're people who've resolutely, unanimously, unshakably decided for a certain number of ours each day. To forget the war, to ignore it, to live as if it were not and never had been so that. So that? So that beauty shall not perish from the earth. Captain shied it, bringing his stick down with a whack on the pavement. Dastry broke into a laugh. Decided to forget the war. Why, bless your heart, they've never, not one of them, ever been able to remember it for an hour together. No, not from the first day, except as it interfered with their plans or cut down their amusements or increased their fortunes. You're the only one of them, my dear chap, since you class yourself among them, of whom what you've just said is true. And if you can forget the war while you're at your work, so much the better for you and for us and for posterity. And I hope you'll paint all Mrs. Talkot's crowd one after another, though I doubt if they're as good subjects now as when you caught them last July with the warfunk on. He held out his hand with a dry smile. Goodbye. I'm off to meet my nephew who's here on leave. He hastened away, leaving Captain in a crumbled world. Loose Dastry on leave, but that was because he was at the front, the real front. In the trenches had already had a slight wind and a fine citation. Staff officers, as George had wisely felt, were not asking for leave just yet. The thoughts excited by this encounter left Captain more than ever resolved to drug himself with work and frivolity. It was none of his business to pry into the consciences of the people about him, not even into Georgian Steins, into which one would presumably have had to be let down in a diver suit with oxygen pumping at top pressure. If the government tolerated Georgian Steins' presence in France, probably on the ground that he could be useful, so the banker himself let it be known, it was silly of people like Adele Anthony and Dastry to wince at the mere mention of his name. There woke in Campton all the old spirit of aimless random defiance, revolt for revolt's sake, which had marked his first period of his life after a separation from his wife. He had long since come to regard it as a cruel and juvenile phase, yet here he was reliving it. Though he knew of the intimacy between Mrs. Tauquette and the Bruntz, he had no fear of meeting Julia. It was impossible to picture her neat head battling with the blasts of that disheveled drawing room. But though she did not appear there, he heard her more and more often alluded to in terms of startling familiarity by Mrs. Tauquette's visitors. It was clear that they all saw her chiefly in her own house, that they thought her, according to their respective vocabularies, a perfect deer, en forme exquise, or en bonnet ville, ah, per Julia. And that, their sudden enthusiasm for her was not uninspired by the fact that she had got her marvellous chief demobilized and was giving little war dinners followed by a quiet turn at Bridge. Compton remembered Madame de Tranley's rebuke to Mrs. Bruntz on the day when he had last called in the Avenue Marigny. Then he remembered also that it was on that very day that he had returned to his painting. After all, she held out longer than I did per Julia, he mused, annoyed at the idea of her being the complacent victim of all the veracities he saw about him. And yet reflecting that she was at last living her life, as they called it, at Mrs. Tauquette's. After all, the fact that George was not at the front seemed to exonerate his parents, unless indeed it did just the opposite. One day, coming earlier than usual to Mrs. Tauquette's, to put in a last afternoon's work on her portrait, Compton, to his surprise, found his wife in front of it. Equally to his surprise, he noticed that she was dressed with a jewellery quite new to her. And for the first time, he thought she looked old fashioned and also old. She met him with her usual embarrassment. I didn't know you came as early as this. Madge told me I might just run in. She waved her hand toward the portrait. I hope you like it. He said, suddenly finding that he didn't. It's marvelous, marvelous. She looked at him timidly. It's extraordinary how you've caught her rhythm, her tempo. She ventured in the jargon of the place. Compton, to hide a smile, turned away to get his brushes. I'm so glad, she continued hastily, that you've begun to paint again. We all need to, to, oh, not you and I, do we? He rejoined with a scornful laugh. She evidently caught the illusion, for she blushed all over her uncovered neck, up through the faintly wrinkled cheeks to the roots of her newly dyed hair. Then he saw her eyes fill. What's she crying for? Because George is not in danger, he wondered, busying himself with his palette, Mrs. Tauket, hurried in with surprise and apologies. And one by one, the habitues followed. With cherry greetings from Mrs. Brunt, on the moment of constraint, as they noted Compton's presence, and the relation between the two, was mutely passed about. Then the bridge tables were brought. Mr. Tauket began to straighten the cards nervously, and the guests broke up into groups, forgetting everything but their own affairs. As Compton turned back to his work, he was aware of a last surprise in the sight of Mrs. Brunt, serene and almost sparkling. Waving her adieu to the bridge tables and going out, followed by George and Stein, with whom she seemed on terms of playful friendliness. Of all strange war promiscuities, Compton thought this the strangest. End of chapter 20, recording by Chad Horner. Chapter 21 of A Son at the Front. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording for LibriVox by Mary Lou in New York City. A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton. Chapter 21. The next time Compton saw Mrs. Brunt was in his own studio. He was preparing one morning to leave the melancholy place when the bell rang and his bun let her in. Her dress was less frivolous than at Mrs. Tolkats, and she wore a densely patterned veil like the ladies in cinema plays when they visit their seducers or their accomplices. Through the veil, she looked at him agitatedly and said, George is not at San Minou. He stared. No, Anderson was there the day before yesterday. Brunt at San Minou. Compton felt the blood rush to his temples. What? He, the boy's father, had not so much as dared to ask for the almost unattainable permission to go into the war zone, and this other man who was nothing to George, absolutely nothing, who had no right, whatever, to ask for leave to visit him, had somehow obtained the priceless favor, and instead of passing it on, instead of offering at least to share it with the boy's father, had sneaked off secretly to feast on the other's lawful privilege. How the devil, Compton burst out. Oh, he got a Red Cross mission. It was arranged very suddenly through a friend. Yes, well, Compton stammered, sitting down lest his legs should fail him and signing to her to take a chair. Well, he was not there, she repeated excitedly. It's what we might have known since he's changed his address. Then he didn't see him, Compton interrupted, the ferocious joy of the discovery, crowding out his wrath and wonder. Anderson didn't. No, he wasn't there, I tell you. The HQ has been moved. No, it hasn't. Anderson saw one of the officers. He said George had been sent on a mission. To another HQ? That's what they said. I don't believe it. What do you believe? I don't know. Anderson's sure they told him the truth. The officer he saw is a friend of George's and he said George was expected back that very evening. Compton sat looking at her uncertainly. Did she dread or did she rather wish to disbelieve the officer's statement? Where did she hope or fear that George had gone? And what were Compton's own emotions? As confused, no doubt, as hers and as undefinable. The insecurity of his feelings moved him to a momentary compassion for hers, which was surely pitiable, whatever else they were. Then a savage impulse swept away every other and he said wherever George was, Brant's visit will have done him no good. She grew pale. What do you mean? I wonder it never occurred to you or to your husband since he's so solicitous. Compton went on prolonging her distress. Please tell me what you mean? She pleaded with frightened eyes. Why in God's name couldn't you both let well enough alone? Didn't you guess why George never asked for leave? Why I've always advised him not to? Don't you know that nothing is as likely to get a young fellow into trouble as having his family force their way through to see him, use influence, seem to ask favors? I dare say that's how that fool of a Dolmets woman got Isidor killed. No one would have noticed where he was if she hadn't gone on so about him. They had to send him to the front, finally. And now the chances are, oh no, no, no, don't say it. She held her hands before her face as if he had flung something flaming at her. It was I who made Anderson go. Well, Brant ought to have thought of that. I did, he pursued sardonically. Her answer disarmed him. You're his father. I don't mean he went on hastily, that Brant's not right. Of course there's nothing to be afraid of. I can't imagine why you thought there was. She hung her head. Sometimes when I hear the other women, other mothers, I feel as if our turn might come too. Even at San Minuo, a shell might hit the house. Anderson said the artillery fire seemed so near. He made no answer and she sat silent without apparent thought of leaving. Finally he said, I was just going out. She stood up. Oh yes, that reminds me. I came to ask you to come with me. With you? The motor's waiting, you must. She laid her hand on his arm. To see Olida, the new clairvoyant. Everyone goes to her. Everybody who's anxious about anyone. Even the scientific people believe in her. She's told people the most extraordinary things. It seems she warned Daisy Dolmetsch. And well, I'd rather know. She burst out passionately. Campton smiled. She'll tell you that George is back at his desk. Well then, isn't that worth it? Please don't refuse me. He disengaged himself gently. My poor Julia, go by all means if it will reassure you. Ah, but you've got to come too. You can't say no. Maj Tolkett tells me that if the two nearest go together, Olida sees so much more clearly. Especially a father and mother, she added hastily, as if conscious of the inopportune word, nearest. After a moment she went on. Even Madame de Trenais has been. Daisy Dolmetsch met her on the stairs. Olida told her that her youngest boy, from whom she'd had no news for weeks, was all right and coming home on leave. Madame de Trenais didn't know Daisy except by sight, but she stopped her to tell her. Only fancy, the last person she would have spoken to in ordinary times, but she was so excited and happy. And two days afterward, the boy turned up, safe and sound, you must come, she insisted. Campton was seized with a sudden deep compassion for all these women groping for a ray of light in the blackness. It moved him to think of Madame de Trenais' proud figure climbing a clairvoyant stairs. I'll come if you want me to, he said. They drove to the Batignol quarter. Mrs. Brand's lips were twitching under her veil. And as the motor stopped, she said childishly, I've never been to this kind of place before. I should hope not, Campton rejoined. He himself, during the Russian lady's rule, had served an apprenticeship among the soothsayers and come away disgusted with the hours wasted in their company. He suddenly remembered the Spanish girl in the little white house near the railway who had told his fortune in the hot afternoons with cards and olive stones and had found by irrefutable signs that he and she would come together again. Well, it was better than this pseudo-scientific humbug he mused, because it was picturesque, and so was she, and she believed in it. Mrs. Brand rang, and Campton followed her into a narrow hall. A servant woman showed them into a salon, which was as commonplace as a doctor's waiting room. On the mantelpiece were vases of pampas grass and a stuffed monkey swung from the electrolyer. Evidently, Madame Olida was superior to the class of fortune tellers who prepare a special stage setting and no astrologer's robe or witch's kitchen was to be feared. The maid led them across a plain dining room into an inner room. The shutters were partly closed and the blinds down. A voluminous woman in loose black rose from a sofa, gold earrings gleamed under her oiled black hair and suddenly through the billows of flesh and behind the large pale mask, Campton recognized the Spanish girl who used to read his fortune in the house by the railway. Her eyes rested a moment on Mrs. Brandt. Then they met his with the same heavy stare, but he noticed that her hands, which were small and fat, trembled a little as she pointed to two chairs. Sit down please, she said in a low, rough voice speaking in French. The door opened again and a young man with leventine eyes and a showy necktie looked in. She said sharply, no, and he disappeared. Campton noticed that a large emerald flashed on his manicured hand. Madame Olida continued to look at her visitors. Mrs. Brandt wiped her dry lips and stammered. We're his parents, a son at the front. Madame Olida fell back in a trance-like attitude, let her lids droop over her magnificent eyes and rested her head against a soiled sofa pillow. Presently she held out both hands. You are his parents, yes? Give me each a hand please. As her cushioned palm touched Campton's, he thought he felt a tremor of recognition and saw in the half light the tremor communicate itself to her lids. He grasped her hand firmly and she lifted her eyes, looked straight into his with her heavy velvety stare and said, you should hold my hand more loosely. The currents must not be compressed. She turned her palm upward so that his fingertips rested on it as if on a keyboard. He noticed that she did not do the same with the hand she had placed in Mrs. Brandt's. Suddenly he remembered that one sultry noon, lying under the olives, she had taught him by signals tapped on his own knee how to say what he chose to her without her brothers knowing it. He looked at the huge woman seeking the curve of the bowed upper lip, on which what used to be a faint blue shadow had now become a line as thick as her eyebrows and recalling how her laugh used to lift the lip above her little round teeth while she threw back her head showing the agnus day in her neck. Now her mouth was like a withered flower and in a crease of her neck, a string of pearls was embedded. Take hands please, she commanded. Julia gave Campton her ungloved hand and he sat between the two women. You are the parents. You want news of your son, like so many. Madame Olida closed her eyes again. To know where he is, whereabouts? That is what we want, Mrs. Brandt whispered. Madame Olida sat as if laboring with difficult visions. The noises of the street came faintly through the closed windows and a smell of garlic and cheap scent oppressed Campton's lungs and awakened old associations. With a final effort of memory, he fixed his eyes on the clairvoyance darkened mask and tapped her palm once or twice. She neither stirred nor looked at him. I see, I see she began in the consecrated phrase. A veil, a thick veil of smoke between me and a face which is young and fair with a short nose and reddish hair, thick, thick, thick. Exactly like this gentleman's when he was young. Mrs. Brandt's hand trembled in Campton's. It's true, she whispered, before your hair turned gray, it used to be as red as Georgie's. The veil grows denser, there are awful noises. There's a face with blood, but not that first face. This is a very young man, as innocent as when he was born with blue eyes like flax flowers, but blood, blood. Why do I see that face? Oh, now it is on a hospital pillow, not your son's face, the other. There is no one near, no one, but some German soldiers laughing and drinking. The lips move, the hands are stretched out in agony, but no one notices. It is a face that has something to say to the gentleman. Not to you, madam, the uniform is different. Is it an English uniform? Now the face turns gray. The eyes shut, there is foam on the lips. Now it is gone. There's another man's head on the pillow. Now, now your son's face comes back, but not near those others. The smoke has cleared. I see a desk and papers. Your son is writing. Oh, gasped Mrs. Brandt. If you squeeze my hands, you arrest the current. Madam Olida reminded her. There was another interval. Campton felt his wife's fingers beating between his, like trapped birds. The heat and darkness oppressed him. Beads of sweat came out on his forehead. Did the woman really see things? And was that face with the blood on it, Benny Upshers? Madam Olida droned on. It is your son who is writing. The young man with the very thick hair. He is writing to you, trying to explain something. Perhaps you have hoped to see him lately? That is it. He is telling you why it could not be. He is sitting quietly in a room. There is no smoke. She released Mrs. Brandt's hand and Campton's. Go home, madam. You are fortunate. Perhaps his letter will reach you tomorrow. Mrs. Brandt stood up sobbing. She found her gold bag and pushed it toward Campton. He had been feeling in his own pocket for money. But as he drew it forth, Madam Olida put back his hand. No, I am superstitious. It's so seldom that I can give good news. Bonjour, madame, bonjour, monsieur. I commend your son to the Blessed Virgin and to all the saints and angels. Campton put Julia into the motor. She was still crying, but her tears were radiant. Isn't she wonderful? Didn't you see how she seemed to recognize George? There's no mistaking his hair. How could she have known what it was like? Don't think me foolish. I feel so comforted. Of course, you'll hear from him tomorrow, Campton said. He was touched by her maternal passion and ashamed of having allowed her so small a share in his jealous worship of his son. He walked away thinking of the young man dying in a German hospital and of the other man's face succeeding his on the pillow. End of chapter 21. Chapter 22 of A Son at the Front. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Lou in New York City. A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton. Chapter 22. Two days later, to Campton's surprise, Anderson Brandt appeared in the morning at the studio. Campton, finishing a late breakfast in careless studio garb, saw his visitor appear cautiously about as though fearing undressed models behind the screens or empty beer bottles under the tables. It was the first time that Mr. Brandt had entered the studio since his attempt to buy George's portrait. And Campton guessed at once that he had come again about George. He looked at the painter shyly as if oppressed by the indiscretion of intruding at that hour. It was my Mrs. Brandt who insisted when she got this letter he brought out between precautionary coughs. Campton looked at him tolerantly. A barrier seemed to have fallen between them since their brief exchange of words about Benny Upsher. The letter, as Campton had expected, was a line from George to his mother, written two days after Mr. Brandt's visit to Samminu. It expressed in George's usual staccato style his regret at having been away. Hard luck when one is riveted to the same square yard of earth for weeks on end to have just happened to be somewhere else the day Uncle Andy broke through. It was always the same tone of fluent banter in which Campton fancied he detected a lurking stridency, like the scrape of an overworked gramophone containing only comic discs. Oh well, his mother must be satisfied, Campton said as he gave the letter back. Oh, completely. So much so that I've induced her to go off for a while to be a wretz. The doctor finds her overdone. She'd got it into her head that George had been sent to the front. I couldn't convince her to the contrary. Campton looked at him. You yourself never believed it? Mr. Brandt, who had half risen, as though feeling that his errand was done, slid back into his seat and clasped his small hands on his agate-headed stick. Oh, never. It was not, Campton pursued, with that idea that you went to Samminu. Mr. Brandt glanced at him in surprise. No, on the contrary. On the contrary. I understood from his mother that in the circumstances you were opposed to his asking for leave. Thought it unadvisable, that is. So as it was such a long time since we'd seen him, the we, pulling him up short, spread a brick-red blush over his baldness. Not longer than since I have, but then I've not your opportunities, Campton retorted, the sneer breaking out in spite of him. Though he had grown kindly disposed toward Mr. Brandt when they were apart, the old resentments still broke out in his presence. Mr. Brandt clasped and unclasped the knob of his stick. I took the first chance that offered. I had his mother to think of. Campton made no answer, and he continued. I was sorry to hear you thought that you had perhaps been imprudent. There's no perhaps about it, Campton retorted. Since you say you were not anxious about the boy, I can't imagine why you made the attempt. Mr. Brandt was silent. He seemed overwhelmed by the others' disapprobation and unable to find any argument in his own defense. I never dreamed it could cause any trouble, he said at length. That's the ground you've always taken in your interference with my son. Campton had risen, pushing back his chair, and Mr. Brandt stood up also. They faced each other without speaking. I'm sorry, Mr. Brandt began, that you should take such a view. It seemed to me natural when Mr. Jorgensen gave me the chance. Jorgensen, it was Jorgensen who took you to the front, took you to see my son. Campton threw his head back and laughed. That's complete, that's really complete. Mr. Brandt reddened as if the laugh had been a blow. He stood very erect, his lips tightly closed as a shut pen knife. He had the attitude of a civilian under fire considerably perturbed, but obliged to set the example of fortitude. Campton looked at him. At last he had Mr. Brandt at a disadvantage. Their respective situations were reversed and he saw that the banker was aware of it and oppressed by the fear that he might have done harm to George. He evidently wanted to say all this and did not know how. His distress moved, Campton, in whose ears the sound of his own outburst still echoed unpleasantly. If only Mr. Brandt would have kept out of his way, he would have found it so easy to be fair to him. I'm sorry, he began in a quieter tone. I dare say I'm unjust. Perhaps it's in the nature of our relation. Can't you understand how I've felt, looking on helplessly all these years while you've done for the boy everything I wanted to do for him myself? Haven't you guessed why I jumped at my first success and nursed my celebrity till I'd got half the fools in Europe lining up to be painted? His excitement was mastering him again and he went on hurriedly. Do you suppose I'd have wasted all these precious years over their stupid faces if I hadn't wanted to make my son independent of you? And he would have been if the war hadn't come. Been my own son again and nobody else's leading his own life, whatever he chose it to be instead of having to waste his youth in your bank learning how to multiply your millions. The futility of this retrospect and the inconsistency of his whole attitude exasperated, Campton, more than anything his visitor could do or say. And he stopped, embarrassed by the sound of his own words, yet seeing no escape saved to bury them under more and more. But Mr. Brandt had opened his lips. They'll be his, you know, the millions, he said. Campton's anger dropped. He felt Mr. Brandt at last too completely at his mercy. He waited for a moment before speaking. You tried to buy his portrait once. You remember I told you it was not for sale, he then said. Mr. Brandt stood motionless grasping his stick in one hand and stroking his mustache with the other. For a while he seemed to be considering Campton's words without feeling their sting. It was not the money he stammered out at length from the depth of some unutterable plea for understanding. Then he added, I wish you a good morning and walked out with his little stiff steps. End of chapter 22, chapter 23 of A Son at the Front. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton, chapter 23. Campton was thoroughly ashamed of what he had said to Mr. Brandt or rather of his manner of saying it. If he could have put the same facts quietly, ironically, without forfeiting his dignity and with the added emphasis which deliberateness and composure give, he would scarcely have regretted the opportunity. He had always secretly accused himself of a lack of courage in accepting Mr. Brandt's heavy benefactions for George when the boy was too young to know what they might pledge him to. And it had been a disappointment that George, on reaching the age of discrimination, had not appeared to find the burden heavy or the obligations unpleasant. Campton, having accepted Mr. Brandt's help, could hardly reproach his son for feeling grateful for it and had therefore thought it more decent to postpone disparagement of their common benefactor till his own efforts had set them both free. Even then it would be impossible to pay off the past, but the past might have been left to bury itself. Now his own wrath had dug it up and he had paid for the brief joy of casting its bones in Mr. Brandt's face by a deep disgust at his own weakness. All these things would have weighed on him even more if the outer weight of events had not been so much heavier. He had not returned to Mrs. Talcott's since the banker's visit. He did not wish to meet Jorgenstein and his talk with the banker and his visit to the clairvoyant had somehow combined to send that whole factitious world tumbling about his years. It was absurd to attach any importance to poor Olida's viticinations, but the vividness of her description of the baby-faced boy dying in a German hospital haunted Campton's nights. If it were not the portrait of Benny Upsher, it was at least that of hundreds and thousands of lads like him who were thus groping and agonizing and stretching out vain hands while in Mrs. Talcott's drawing room well-fed men and expensive women heroically forgot the war. Campton, seeking to expiate his own brief forgetfulness by a passion of renewed activity, announced to Boylston the next afternoon that he was coming back to the office. Boylston hardly responded. He looked up from his desk with a face so strange that Campton broke off to cry out, "'What's happened?' The young man held out a newspaper. "'They've done it, they've done it,' he shouted. Across the page, the name of the Lusitania blazed out like the writing on the wall. The berserker light on Boylston's placid features transformed him into an avenging cherub. "'Ah, now we're in it, we're in it at last,' he exalted, as if the horror of the catastrophe were already swallowed up in its result. The two looked at each other without further words, but the older man's first thought had been for his son. Now, indeed, America was in it. The gross, tangible proof for which her government had forced her to wait was there in all its unimagined horror. Kant and cowardice in high places had drugged and stupefied her into the strange belief that she was too proud to fight for others. And here she was brutally forced to fight for herself. Campton waited with a straining heart for his son's first comment on the new fact that they were in it. But his excitement and Boylston's exultation were short-lived. Before many days it became apparent that the proud nation, which had flamed up overnight at the unproved outrage of the Maine, was lying supine under the flagrant provocation of the Lusitania, the days which followed were, too many Americans, the bitterest of the war. To Campton they seemed the ironic justification of the phase of indifference and self-absorption through which he had just passed. He could not go back to Mrs. Talcott and her group, but neither could he take up his work with even his former zeal. The bitter taste of the national humiliation was perpetually on his lips. He went about like a man dishonored. He wondered, as the days and the weeks passed at having no word from George, had he refrained from writing because he, too, felt the national humiliation too deeply, either to speak of it or to leave it unmentioned? Or was he so sunk in security that he felt only a mean thankfulness that nothing was changed? From such thoughts, Campton's soul recoiled, but they lay close under the surface of his tenderness and reared their evil heads whenever they caught him alone. As the summer dragged itself out, he was more and more alone. Dastry, cured of his rheumatism, had left the ministry to resume his ambulance work. Miss Anthony was submerged under the ever-mounting tide of refugees. Mrs. Brandt had taken a small house at Dovi on the pretext of being near her hospital, and Campton heard of the talkets being with her and others of their set. Mr. Mayhew appeared at the studio one day in tennis flannels and a new straw hat, announcing that he needed rest and rather sheepishly adding that Mrs. Brandt had suggested his spending a quiet fortnight with her. I've got to do it if I'm to see this thing through, Mr. Mayhew added in a stern voice as if commanding himself not to waver. A few days later, glancing over the herald, Campton read that Madame de Dolmetsch, the celebrated artiste, was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Brandt at Dovi where she had gone to give recitations for the wounded in hospital. Campton smiled and then thought with a tightening heart of Benny Upscher and Ladislaus Isidore, so incredibly unlike in their lives, so strangely one in their death. Finally, not long afterward, he read that the celebrated financier, Sir Cyril Jorgensen, recently knighted by the British government, had bestowed a gift of 100,000 francs upon Mrs. Brandt's hospital. It was rumored, the paragraph ended, that Sir Cyril would soon receive the Legion of Honor for his magnificent liberalities to France and still the flood of war rolled on. Success here, failure there, the menace of disaster elsewhere, Russia retreating to the sun, Italy declaring war on Austria and preparing to cross the Isonzo, the British advance at Anzac and from the Near East, news of the new landing at Zuvla. Through all this alternating of tragedy and triumph, ran the million and million individual threads of hope, fear, fortitude, resolve with which the fortune of the war was obscurely but fatally interwoven. Campton remembered his sneer at Dastry's phrase, one can at least contribute an attitude. He had begun to feel the force of that, to understand the need of every human beings, pulling his weight in the struggle, had begun to scan every face in the street in the passionate effort to distinguish between the stones in the wall of resistance and the cracks through which discouragement might filter. The shabby office of the Palais Royale again became his only haven. His portrait of Mrs. Talcott had brought him many new orders, but he refused them all and declined even to finish the pictures interrupted by the war. One of his abrupt revulsions of feeling had flung him back heart and brain into the horror he had tried to escape from. If thou ascend up to heaven, I am there. If thou make thy bed in hell, behold, I am there, the war said to him. And as the daily headlines shrieked out the names of new battlefields from the Arctic shore to the Pacific, he groaned back like the psalmist, with or shall I go from thee? The people about him, Miss Antony Boylston, Manuel de Vril and all their band of tired, resolute workers plotted ahead, their eyes on their task seeming to find in its fulfillment a partial escape from the intolerable oppression. The women, especially, with their gift of living in the particular, appeared hardly aware of the appalling development of the catastrophe. And Campton felt himself almost as lonely among these people who thought of nothing but the war as among those who hardly thought of it at all. It was only when he and Boylston, after a hard morning's work, went out to lunch together that what he called the Lusitania look, suddenly darkening the younger man's face, moved the painter with an anguish like his own. Boylston, breaking through his habitual shyness, had one day remonstrated with Campton for not going on with his painting. But the latter had merely rejoined, we've each of us got to worry through this thing in our own way. And the subject was not again raised between them. The intervals between George's letters were growing longer. Campton, who noted in his pocket diary the dates of all that he received, as well as those addressed to Mrs. Brandt and Miss Anthony, had not had one to record since the middle of June. And in that, there was no illusion to the Lusitania. It's queer, he said to Boylston one day toward the end of July. I don't know yet what George thinks about the Lusitania. Oh, yes, you do, sir, Boylston returned, laughing. But all the males from the war zone he added have been very much delayed lately. When there's a big attack on anywhere, they hold up everything along the line. And besides, no end of letters are lost. I suppose so, said Campton, pocketing the diary and trying for the millionth time to call up a vision of his boy seated at a desk in some still unvisualized place. His rumbled, fair head bent above columns of figures or files of correspondence. While day after day, the roof above him shook with the roar of the attacks which held up his letters. End of chapter 23. Chapter 24 of A Sun at the Front. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Lou in New York City. A Sun at the Front by Edith Wharton. Chapter 24. 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 Brandt. 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 Saint 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 argon 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. Brandt's presence at his side and the fact that the motor they were sitting in was Mr. Brandt'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 colorless and expressionless, we are already at Lusarch. It was the first time Campton was sure that Mr. Brandt 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 travelers did not share a rug. A separate one, soft as fur and light as down, lay neatly folded on the gray carpet before each seat. But Campton, though the early air was biting, had left his where at 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, Lusarch. It was not that they're lingered in him, any of his old sense of antipathy toward Mr. Brandt. 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. Brandt 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. Brandt go to Doulan with him. But the exchange of speech with anyone, whether Mr. Brandt 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 Fortan-les-Cruces 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 Fortan-les-Cruces 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 a 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. Let me tell 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, none of you were 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. Brandt. 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. If this thing happened, Boylston ended in a stricken voice. He said you were not to be unfair to her. 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 Honor ever mean? And to deal with it all in the wild minutes of preparation for departure, of intercession with the authorities, sittings at the photographers, and a crisscross of confused telephone calls from the embassy, the prefecture, 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. 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 wand 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 the 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 Madame Olida's evoking. Mrs. Brandt was still at Beiritz. There had been no possibility of her getting back in time to share the journey to the front. Even Mr. Brandt's power in high places must have fallen short of such an attempt, and it was not made. Boylston, dispatched in haste to bear the news of George's wounding to the banker, had reported that the utmost Mr. Brandt could do was to write it once to his wife in a range for her return to Paris, since telegrams to the frontier departments traveled more slowly than letters. And in nine cases out of 10 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, browsed the same memory in both of them. Meeting her eyes, he saw there the Gardelet in the summer morning, the noisily maneuvering 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 Leitari 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 eyeglasses and rubbing them with a beautifully monogrammed cambered 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 motorcycles 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 Chalon in the early days to appeal to Fortin-les-Clues. 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 Chalon, 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 travelers to their unrecognizable photographs. Mr. Brandt 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 bankers. 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. Brandt fidgeted with his eyeglasses and after an interval coughed again. I must thank you, he began, for saving me just now from an inexcusable blunder. It was done mechanically. One gets into the habit. Quite so, said Campton dryly. But there are cases. Of course, of course. Silence fell once more. Mr. Brandt sat bolt upright, his profile detached against the wintry fields. Campton sunk into his corner, glanced now and then at the neat gray silhouette in which the perpendicular glint of the eyeglass 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. Brandt 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 van loads of troops pressing forward. It seemed to Campton that hours elapsed before Mr. Brandt 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 Lavangro. 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. Brandt, 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. Brandt had told his stepson, to which George was recorded to have answered sturdily. No, it won't if I find other stories I like better. Ms. 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. Brandt's tacit right to be sitting here beside him today. Then the fact that but for Mr. Brandt 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 travelers 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. Brandt 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. Brandt, 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. Brandt 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. Brandt was right. He must not let himself float away into the void, seductive as its drowsy shimmer was. His widths returned and with them a more intolerable sense of reality. He was all alive now. Every crash of the gun seemed to tear a piece of flesh from his body and it was always the peace nearest the heart. The nurses 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 Honor, 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. Doulin said, Mr. Brandt, 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 Chanel. A young doctor in a cotton blouse was lighting a cigarette and laughing with a nurse. Laughing. At regular intervals, the canon age shook the windows. It seemed the heartbeat 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 colored 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. End of chapter 24. Chapter 25 of A Son at the Front. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Lou in New York City. A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton. Chapter 25. He followed his guide up the steep flights, which seemed to become buoyant and lift him like waves. It was as if the muscle that always dragged back his lame leg had suddenly regained its elasticity. He floated up as one mounts stairs in a dream. A smell of disinfectants hung in the cold air and once, through a half-open door, a sickening odor came. He remembered it from Chalon and Fortin's murmured, gangrene, oh, if only we could get them sooner. How soon had they got his boy, Campton wondered. The letter, mercifully sent by hand to Paris, had reached him on the third day after George's arrival at the Doulin Hospital. But he did not yet know how long before that, the shell splinter had done its work. The nurse did not know either. How could she remember? They had so many. The administrator would look up the files and tell him. Only there was no time for that now. On a landing, Campton heard a babble and scream, a nauseating scream in a queer, bleached voice that might have been man, woman, or monkeys. Perhaps that was what the French meant by a white voice, this voice which was as featureless as some of the poor men's obliterated faces. Campton shot an anguished look at his companion and she understood and shook her head. Oh no, that's in the big ward. It's the way they scream after a dressing. She opened a door and he was in a room with three beds in it. Wooden pallets hastily knocked together and spread with rough gray blankets. In spite of the cold, flies still swarmed on the unwashed panes and there were big holes in the fly net over the bed nearest the window. Under the net lay a middle-aged, bearded man, heavily bandaged about the chest and left arm. He was snoring, his mouth open, his gaunt cheeks drawn in with the fight for breath. Campton said to himself that if his own boy lived, he should like someday to do something for this poor devil who was his roommate. Then he looked about him and saw that the two other beds were empty and he drew back. The nurse was bending over the bearded man. He'll wake presently, I'll leave you. And she slipped out. Campton looked again at the stranger. Then his glance traveled to the scarred brown hand on the sheet, a hand with broken nails and blackened fingertips. It was George's hand, his son's, swollen, disfigured, but unrestakeable. The father knelt down and laid his lips on it. What was the first thing you felt? Adele Anthony asked him afterwards and he answered, nothing. Yes, at the very first, I know it's always like that, but the first thing after you began to feel anything. He considered and then said slowly, the difference. The difference in him, in him, in life, in everything. Miss Anthony, who understood as a rule, was evidently puzzled. What kind of a difference? Oh, a complete difference. With that, she had to be content. The sense of it had first come to Campton when the bearded man, raising his lids, looked at him from far off with George's eyes and touched him very feebly with George's hand. It was in the moment of identifying his son that he felt the son he had known to be lost to him forever. George's lips were moving and the father laid his ear to them. Perhaps these were the last words that his boy was saying. Old dad, in a motor? Campton nodded. The fact seemed faintly to interest George who continued to examine him with those distant eyes. Uncle Andy's, Campton nodded again. Mother, she's coming too, very soon. George's lips were screwed into a whimsical smile. I must have a shave first, he said, and drowsed off again, his hand in Campton's. The other gentlemen, the nurse, questioned the next morning. Campton had spent the night in the hospital stretched on the floor at his son's threshold. It was a breach of rules, but for once the major had condoned it. As for Mr. Brant, Campton had forgotten all about him and at first did not know what the nurse meant. Then he woke with a start to the consciousness of his fellow traveler's nearness. Mr. Brant, the nurse explained, had come to the hospital early and had been waiting below for the last two hours. Campton, almost as gaunt and unshorn as his son, pulled himself to his feet and went down. In the hall, the banker, very white, but smooth and trim as ever, was patiently measuring the muddy flags. Let's temperature this morning, Campton called from the last flight. Oh, stammered Mr. Brant, red and pale by turns. Campton smiled haggardly and pulled himself together in an effort of communicativeness. Look here, he's asked for you. You'd better go up, only for a few minutes, please. He's awfully weak. Mr. Brant, speechless, stood stiffly waiting to be conducted. Campton noticed the mist in his eyes and took pity on him. I say, where's the hotel? Just a step away? I'll go around then and get a shave and a wash while you're with him, the father said with a magnanimity which he somehow felt the powers might take account of in their subsequent dealings with George. If the boy was to live, Campton could afford to be generous and he had decided to assume that the boy would live and to order his behavior accordingly. I thank you, said Mr. Brant, turning toward the stairs. Five minutes at the outside, Campton cautioned him and hurried out into the morning air through which the gun still crashed methodically. When he got back to the hospital, refreshed and decent, he was surprised and for a moment alarmed to find that Mr. Brant had not come down. Sending up his temperature, of course, damn him. Campton raged, scrambling up the stairs as fast as his stiff leg permitted. But outside of George's door, he saw a small figure patiently mounting guard. I stayed with him less than five minutes. I was merely waiting to thank you. Oh, that's all right. Campton paused and then made his supreme effort. How does he strike you? Hopefully, hopefully. He had his joke, as usual, Mr. Brant said with a twitching smile. Oh, that. But his temperatures decidedly lower. Of course, they may have to take the ball out of the lung, but perhaps before they do it, he can be moved from this hell. The two men were silent, the same passion of anxiety consuming them and no means left of communicating it to each other. I'll look in again later. Shall I have something to eat sent round to you from the hotel? Mr. Brant suggested? Oh, thanks, if you would. Campton put out his hand and crushed Mr. Brant's dry fingers. But for this man, he might not have got to his son in time. And this man had not once made use of the fact to press his own claim on George. With pity in his heart, the father, privileged to remain at his son's bedside, watched Mr. Brant's small figure retreating alone. How ghastly to sit all day in that squalid hotel, his eyes on his watch, with nothing to do but to wonder and wonder about the temperature of another man's son. The next day was worse, so much worse that everything disappeared from Campton's view, but the present agony of watching, hovering, hanging helplessly on the words of nurse and doctor, and spying on the glances they exchanged behind his back. There could be no thought yet of extracting the bullet. A great surgeon passing through the wards on a hasty tour of inspection had confirmed this verdict. Oh, to have kept the surgeon there, to have had him at hand, to watch for the proficient moment and seize it without an instance delay. Suddenly the vision, which to Campton had been among the most hideous of all his crowding nightmares, that of George stretched naked on an operating table, his face hidden by a chloroform mask, and an orderly, hurrying away with a pile of red towels, like those perpetually carried through the passages below. This vision became to the father's fevered mind as soothing as a glimpse of paradise. If only George's temperature would go down, if only the doctors would pronounce him strong enough to have the bullet taken out. What would anything else matter then? Campton would feel as safe as he used to years ago, when after the recurring months of separation, the boy came back from school and he could take him in his arms and make sure that he was the same Geordie, only bigger, browner, with thicker, curlier hair and tougher muscles behind his jacket. What if the great surgeon, on his way back from the front, were to pass through the town again that evening, reverse his verdict, and perhaps even perform the operation then and there? Was there no way of prevailing on him to stop and take another look at George on the return? The idea took immediate possession of Campton, crowding out his intolerable anguish and bringing such relief that for a few seconds he felt as if some life-saving operation had been performed on himself. As he stood watching the great man's retreat, followed by doctors and nurses, Mr. Brandt suddenly touched his arm and the eyes of the two met. Campton understood and gasped out, yes, yes, we must manage to get him back. Mr. Brandt nodded at all costs. He paused again, interrogated Campton's eyes and stammered, you authorize? Oh, God, anything. He's dined at my house in Paris. Mr. Brandt threw in as if trying to justify himself. Oh, go, go! Campton almost pushed him down the stairs. 10 minutes later he reappeared, modest but exultant. Well, he wouldn't commit himself before the others. Oh, but to me, as he was getting into the motor, well, yes, if possible, somewhere about midnight. Campton turned away choking and stumped off toward the tall window at the end of the passage. Below him lay the court. A line of stretchers was being carried across it, not empty this time, but each one with a bloody burden. Doctors, nurses, orderlies hurried to and fro. Drub, drub, drub, went the guns, shaking the windows, rolling their fierce din along the cloudy sky, down the corridors of the hospital and the pavement of the streets, like huge bowls crashing through story above story of a kind of sky scraping bowling alley. Even the dead underground must hear them, Campton muttered. The word made him shudder superstitiously and he crept back to George's door and opened it, but the nurse within shook her head. He must sleep after the examination, better go. Campton turned and saw Mr. Brandt waiting. A bell rang 12. The two in silence walked down the stairs, crossed the court, averting their eyes from the stretchers and went to the hotel to get something to eat. Midnight came, it passed. No one in the hurried confused world of the hospital had heard of the possibility of the surgeon's returning. When Campton mentioned it to the nurse, she smiled her tired smile and said, he could have done nothing, done nothing. How could she know? How could anyone but the surgeon himself? Would he have promised if he had not thought there was some chance? Campton stretched out on a blanket and his rolled up coat, lay through the long restless hours, staring at the moonlit sky framed by the window of the corridor. Great clouds swept over that cold, indifferent vault. They seemed like the smoke from the guns which had not once ceased through the night. At last he got up, turned his back on the window and lay down again facing the stairs. The moonlight unrolled a white strip along the stone floor. A church bell rang one, two. There were noises and movements below, Campton raised himself, his heart beating all over his body. Steps came echoing up, careful, someone called. A stretcher rounded the stair rail, another and then another. An orderly with a lantern preceded them, followed by one of the doctors, an old bunched up man in a muddy uniform who stopped furtively to take a pinch of snuff. Campton could not believe his eyes. Didn't the hospital people know that every bed on that floor was full? Every bed that is but the two in George's room and the nurse had given Campton the hope, the promise almost that as long as his boy was so ill she would keep those empty. I'll manage somehow, she had said. For a mad moment, Campton was on the point of throwing himself in the way of the tragic procession, barring the threshold with his arms. What does this mean? He stammered to the nurse who had appeared from another room with her little lamp. She gave a shrug, more casualties. Every hospital is like this. He stood aside, wrathful, impotent, at least if Brandt had been there perhaps by some offer of money. But how, to whom of what earthly use after all was Brandt's boasted influence? These people would only laugh at him, perhaps put them both out of the hospital. He turned despairingly to the nurse. You might as well have left him in the trenches. Don't say that, sir, she answered. And the echo of his own words horrified him, like a sacrilege. Two of the stretchers were carried into George's room. Campton caught a glimpse of George muttering and tossing. The moonlight lay in the hollows of his bearded face. And again the father had the sense of utter alienation from that dark delirious man who for brief intervals suddenly became his son and then as suddenly wandered off into strangeness. The nurse slipped out of the room and signed to him, both nearly gone. They won't trouble him long, she whispered. The man on the third stretcher was taken to a room at the other end of the corridor. Campton watched him being lifted in. He was to lie on the floor then, for in that room there was certainly no vacancy. But presently he had the answer. The bearers did not come out empty handed. They carried another man whom they laid on the empty stretcher. Lucky, lucky devil, going no doubt to a hospital at the rear. As the procession reached the stairs, the lantern swung above the lucky devil's face. His eyes stared ceilingward from black orbits. One arm swinging loose dangled down, the hand stealthily counting the steps as he descended. And no one troubled, for he was dead. A dawn, Campton, who must have been asleep, started up again hearing steps. The surgeon, oh, if this time it were the surgeon. But only Mr. Brant detached himself from the shadows accumulated in the long corridor. Mr. Brant crumpled and unshorn with bloodshot eyes and gloves on his unconscious hands. Campton glared at him resentfully. Well, how about your surgeon? I don't see him, he exclaimed. Mr. Brant shook his head despondently. No, I've been waiting all night in the court. I thought if he came back, I should be the first to catch him. But he has just sent his orderly for instruments. He's not coming. There's been terrible fighting. Campton saw two tears running down Mr. Brant's face. They did not move him. The banker glanced toward George's door, full of the question he dared not put. Campton answered it, you want to know how he is? Well, how should he be? With that bullet in him and the fever eating him inch by inch and two more wounded men in his room, that's how he is, Campton almost shouted. Mr. Brant was trembling all over. Two more men in his room, he echoed shrilly. Yes, bad cases, dying. Campton drew a deep breath. You see, there are times when your money and your influence and your knowing everybody are no more use than so much sawdust. The nurse opened the door and looked out. You're talking too loudly, she said. She shut the door and the two men stood silent, abashed. Finally, Mr. Brant turned away. I'll go and try again. There must be other surgeons, other ways, he whispered. Oh, your surgeons. Oh, your ways, Campton sneered after him in the same whisper. End of chapter 25.