 1 John Campton, the American portrait painter, stood in his bare studio in Monmarch at the end of a summer afternoon, contemplating a battered calendar that hung against the wall. The calendar marked July 30, 1914. Campton looked at this date with a gaze of unmixed satisfaction. His son, his only boy, who was coming from America, must have landed in England that morning, and after a brief halt in London would join him the next evening in Paris. To bring the moment nearer, Campton, smiling at his weakness, tore off the leaf and uncovered the 31. Then, leaning in the window, he looked out over his untidy scrap of garden at the silver-gray sea of Paris, spreading mysteriously below him. A number of visitors had passed through the studio that day. After years of obscurity, Campton had been projected into the light, or perhaps only into the limelight, by his portrait of his son George, exhibited three years earlier at the spring show of the French Society of Painters and Sculptors. The pictures seemed to its author to be exactly in the line of the unnoticed things he had been showing before, though perhaps nearer to what he was always trying for, because of the exceptional interest of his subject. But to the public, he had appeared to take a new turn, or perhaps some critic had suddenly found the right phrase for him, or, that season, people wanted a new painter to talk about. Didn't he know by heart all the Paris reasons for success or failure? The early years of his career had given him ample opportunity to learn them. Like other young students of his generation, he had come to Paris with an exaggerated reverence for the few conspicuous figures who made the old salons of the eighties, like bad plays written around a few stars. If he could get near enough to Borsitte, the ruling light of the galaxy, he thought he might do things not unworthy of that great master. But Borsitte, who had ceased to receive pupils, saw no reason for making an exception in favour of an obscure youth without backing. He was not kind, and on the only occasion when a painting of Camptons came under his eye, he led for an epigram which went the round of Paris, but shocked its victim by its revelation of the great man's ineptitude. Campton, if he could have gone on admiring Borsitte's work, would have forgotten his unkindness and even his critical incapacity. But as the young painter's personal convictions developed, he discovered that his idol had none, and that the dazzling mostia still enveloping his work was only the light from a dead star. All these things were now nearly thirty years old. Borsitte had vanished from the heavens and the youth he had sneered at thrown there in his stead. Most of the people who besieged Campton's studio were the lineal descendants of those who had echoed Borsitte's sneer. They belonged to the types that Campton least cared to paint, but they were usually those who paid the highest prices. And he had lately had new and imperious reasons for wanting to earn all the money he could. So for two years he had let it be as difficult and expensive as possible to be done by Campton, and this oppressive July day had been crowded with the visits of suppliants of assort unused to waiting on anybody's pleasure. People who had postponed St Moritz and De Vee and Eee and Raya because it was known that one had to accept the master's conditions or apply elsewhere. The job bored him more than ever. The more of their fatuous faces he recorded, the more he hated the task. But for the last two or three days the monotony of his toil had been relieved by a new element of interest. This was produced by what he called the Warfunk, and consisted in the effect on his sitters and their friends of the suggestion that something new, incomprehensible, and uncomfortable might be about to threaten their ordered course of their pleasures. Campton himself did not believe in the war, as the current phrase went. Therefore he was able to note with perfect composure its agitating effect upon his sitters. On the whole the women behaved best. The idiotic Madame de Dormech had actually grown beautiful through fear for her lover, who turned out, in spite of her name as exotic as hers, to be a French subject of military age. The men had made a less creditable showing, especially the big banker and promoter Jorgenstein, whose red round face had withered like a pricked balloon, and the young Prince Dimitrios Palamedis just married to the fabulously rich daughter of an Argentine wheat grower, and so secure as to his bride's fortune that he could curse impartially all the disturbances of his summer plans. Even the great tuberculosis specialist Fortanley Cluz, whom Campton was painting in return for the physicians devoted care of George in the previous year, had lost something of his professional composure, and no longer gave out the sense of tranquilizing strength which had been such a help in the boy's fight for health. Fortanley's Cluz, always in contact with the rulers of the earth, must surely have some hint of their counsels. Whatever it was he revealed nothing, but continued to talk frivolously and infatuatedly about her new Javanese dancer whom he wanted Campton to paint. But his large, beaked face with its triumphant moustache had grown pinched and grey, and he had forgotten to renew the dye on the moustache. Campton's one really imperturbable visitor was little Charlie Alicante, the Spanish Secretary of the Embassy at Berlin, who had dropped in on his way to St Moritz, bringing the newest news from the Wilhelmstrasse, news that was all suavity and reassurance, with a touch of playful reproach for the irritability of French feeling, and a reminder of imperial longanimity in regard to the foolish misunderstandings of Agadir and Severn. Now all the visitors had gone, and Campton, leaning in the window, looked out over Paris and mused on his summer plans. He meant to plunge straight down to southern Italy and Sicily, perhaps even push over to North Africa. That at least was what he hoped for. No sun was too hot for him, and no landscape too arid. But it all depended on George, for George was going with him, and if George preferred Spain, they would postpone the desert. It was almost impossible to Campton to picture what it would be like to have the boy with him, for so long he had seen his son only in snatches, hurriedly, incompletely, uncomprehendingly. It was only in the last three years that their intimacy had had a chance to develop, and they had never travelled together, except for hasty dashes, two or three times, to seashore or mountains, had never gone off on a long, solitary journey such as this. Campton, tired, disenchanted, and nearing sixty, found himself looking forward to the adventure, with an eagerness as great as the different sort of ardour which within his youth he had imagined flights of another kind, with the woman who was to fulfil every dream. Well, I suppose that the stuff pictures are made of, he thought, smiling at his inextinguishable belief in the completeness of his next experience. Life had perpetually knocked him down, just as he had his hand on her gifts. Nothing had ever succeeded with him but his work. But he was as sure as ever that peace of mind and contentment of heart were waiting for him round the next corner, and this time it was clear they were to come to him through his wonderful son. The doorbell rang, and he listened for the maid's servant's step. There was another impatient jingle, and he remembered that his faithful Mariette had left for Lee, where she was to spend her vacation with her family. Campton, reaching for his stick, shuffled across the studio with his lame, awkward stride. At the door stood his old friend Paul Dastry, one of the few men with whom he had been unbrokenly intimate since the first days of his disturbed and incoherent Parisian life. Dastry came in without speaking. His small, dry face, seemed with premature wrinkles of irony and sensitiveness, looked unusually grave. The wrinkles seemed suddenly to have become those of an old man, and how gray Dastry had turned. He walked a little stiffly, with a jauntiness obviously intended to conceal a growing tendency to rheumatism. In the middle of the floor he paused and tapped a varnished boot-tip with his stick. Let's see what you've done to Daisy Dolmetsch. Oh, it's been done for me, you'll see. Campton laughed. He was enjoying the sight of Dastry, and thinking that this visit was providentially timed to give him a chance of expatiating on his coming journey. In his rare moments of expansiveness he felt the need of some substitute for the background of domestic sympathy which, as a rule, would have simply bored or exasperated him, and at such times he could always talk to Dastry. The little man screwed up his eyes and continued to tap his varnished toes. But she's magnificent, she's seen the Medusa! Campton laughed again. Just so. For days and days I'd been trying to do something with her, and suddenly the war-funk did it for me. The war-funk? Who'd have thought it? She's frightened to death about Ladislas Isidore, who is French as it turns out, and mobilisable. The poor soul thinks there's going to be war. Well, there is, said Dastry. The two men looked at each other. Campton amused, incredulous, a shade impatient at the perpetual recurrence of the same theme, and aware of presenting a smile of irritating unresponsiveness to his friend Solon Gaze. Oh, come! You too? Why, the Duke of Alicante just left here, fresh from Berlin. You ought to hear him laugh at us. How about Berlin's laughing at him? Dastry sank into a wicker armchair, drew out a cigarette, and forgot to light it. Campton returned to the window. There can't be war. I'm going to Sicily and Africa with George the day after tomorrow! He broke out. Ah, George, to be sure. There was a silence. Dastry had not even smiled. He turned the unlit cigarette in his dry fingers. Too young for seventy, and too old for this. Some men are born under a curse. He burst out. What on earth are you talking about? Campton exclaimed, forcing his gaiety a little. Dastry stared at him with furious eyes. But I shall get something, somewhere. They can't stop a man's enlisting. I had an old uncle who did it in seventy. He was older than I am now. Campton looked at him compassionately. Poor little circumscribed Paul Dastry, whose utmost adventure had been an occasional article in an art review, and occasional six weeks in the nearest. It was pitiful to see him breathing fire and fury on an enemy one knew to be engaged at that very moment in meeting England and France more than half way in the effort to smooth over diplomatic difficulties. But Campton could make allowances for the nerves of the tragic generation brought up in the shadow of Sudan. Look here, he said. I'll tell you what. Come along with George and me, as far as Palermo, anyhow. You're a little stiff again in that left knee, and we can bake our lamenesses together in the good Sicilian oven. Dastry had found a match and lighted his cigarette. My poor Campton, there'll be war in three days. Campton's incredulity was shot through with the deadly chill of conviction. There it was. There would be war. It was too like his cursed luck not to be true. He smiled inwardly, perceiving that he was viewing the question exactly as the despicable Jorgenstein and the fatuous Prince Demetrios had viewed it, as an unwarrantable interference with his private plans. Yes, but his case was different. Here was the son he had never seen enough of, never till lately seen at all, as most fathers see their sons. And the boy was to be packed off to New York that winter to go into a bank. And for the Lord knew how many months this was to be their last chance, as it was almost their first, of being together quietly, confidentially, uninterruptedly. These other men were winding at the interruption of their vile pleasures or their vile money-making. He, poor devil, was trembling for the chance to lay the foundation of a complete and lasting friendship with his only son, at a moment when such understandings do most to shape a youth's future. And with what I've had to fight against, he groaned, seeing victory in sight and sickening at the idea that it might be snatched from him. Then another thought came, and he felt the blood leaving his ruddy face and, as it seemed, receding from every vein of his heavy awkward body. He sat down opposite Dastry, and the two looked at each other. There won't be war. But if there were, why shouldn't George and I go to Sicily? You don't see us sitting here making lint, do you? Dastry smiled. Lint is unhygienic. You won't have to do that, and I see no reason why you shouldn't go to Sicily, or to China. He paused. But how about George? I thought he and you were both born in France. Campton reached for a cigarette. We were, worse luck. He's subject to your preposterous military regulations, but it doesn't make any difference as it happens. He's sure to be discharged after that touch of tuberculosis he had last year, when he had to be rushed up to the Angadine. I see. Then, as you say. Still, of course, he wouldn't be allowed to leave the country. A constrained silence fell between the two. Campton became aware that, for the first time since they had known each other, their points of view were the width of the poles apart. It was hopeless to try to bridge such a distance. Of course, you know, he said, trying for his easiest voice. I still consider this discussion purely academic, but if it turns out that I'm wrong, I shall do all I can, all I can do here, to get George discharged. You'd better know that. Dastry, rising, held at his hand with his faithful smile. My dear old Campton, I perfectly understand a foreigner's taking that view. He walked towards the door, and they parted without more words. When he had gone, Campton began to recover his reassurance. Who was Dastry, poor chap, to behave as if he were in the councils of the powers? It was perfect nonsense to pretend that a diplomatess straight from Berlin didn't know more about what was happening there than the newsmongers of the boulevards. One didn't have to be an ambassador to see which way the wind was blowing, and men like Alicante, belonging to a country uninvolved in the affair, were the only people capable of a cool judgment at moments of international tension. Campton took the portrait of Madame de Dolmetsch and leaned it against the other canvases along the wall. Then he started clumsily to put the room to rights. Without Mariette he was so helpless, and finally, abandoning the attempt, said to himself, I'll come and wind things up tomorrow. He was moving that day from the studio to the hotel de Creon, where George was to join him the next evening. It would be jolly to be with the boy from the moment he arrived, and even if Mariette's departure had not paralysed his primitive housekeeping, he could not have made room for his son at the studio. So reluctantly, for he loathed luxury and conformity, but joyously, because he was to be with George, Campton threw some shabby clothes into a shapeless portmanteau, and prepared to dispatch the concierge for a taxicab. He was hobbling down the stairs when the old woman met him with a telegram. He tore it open and saw that it was dated de vie, and was not as he had feared from his son. Barry anxious, must see you tomorrow, please come to Avenue Marigny at five without fail, Julia Brandt. Oh, damn, Compton growled, crumpling up the message. The concierge was looking at him with searching eyes. Is it war, sir? She asked, pointing to the bit of blue paper. He supposed she was thinking of her grandsons. No, no, nonsense, war. He smiled into her shrewd old face, every wrinkle of which seemed full of a deep human experience. War? Can you imagine anything more absurd? Can you now? What should you say if they told you war was going to be declared, madame LaBelle? She gave him back his look with profound earnestness. Then she spoke in a voice of sudden resolution. Why, I should say we don't want it, sir. I'd have four in it if it came, but that this sort of thing has got to stop. Compton shrugged. Oh, well, it's not going to come, so don't worry, and call me a taxi, will you? No, no, I'll carry the bags down myself. End of chapter one. Chapter two 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 two. But even if they do mobilize, mobilization is not war, is it? Mrs. Anderson Brant repeated across the teacups. Compton dragged himself up from the deep arm chair he had inadvertently chosen. To escape from his hostesses, troubled eyes, he limped across to the window and stood gazing out at the thick turf and brilliant flower borders of the garden, which was so unlike his own. After a moment, he turned and glanced about him, catching the reflection of his heavy figure in a mirror dividing two garlanded panels. He had not entered Mrs. Brant's drawing room for nearly 10 years, not since the period of the interminable discussions about the choice of a school for George, and in spite of the far graver preoccupations that now weighed on him, and of the huge menace with which the whole world was echoing, he paused for an instant to consider the contrast between his clumsy person and that expensive and irreproachable room. You've taken away Bossit's portrait of you, he said abruptly, looking up at the chimney panel, which was filled with the blue and umber bloom of a Fragonard landscape. A full length of Mrs. Anderson Brant, by Bossit, had been one of Mr. Brant's wedding presents to his bride. A Bossit's portrait at that time was as much a part of such marriages as pearls and sables. Yes, Anderson thought the dress had grown so dreadfully old-fashioned, she explained indifferently, and went on again, you think it's not war, don't you? What was the use of telling her what he thought? For years and years he had not done that about anything, but suddenly now a stringent necessity had drawn them together, confronting them like any two plain people caught in a common danger, like husband and wife, for example. It is war this time, I believe, he said. She sat down her cup with a hand that had begun to tremble. I disagree with you entirely, she retorted, her voice shrill with anxiety. I was frightfully upset when I sent you that telegram yesterday, but I've been lunching today with the old Duke de Montelli, you know, he fought in 1970, and with Levi Michel of the Jure, who had just seen some of the government people, and they both explained to me quite clearly that you'd made a mistake in coming up from Deauville? To save himself, Campton could not restrain the sneer. On the rare occasions when a crisis in their lives had flung them on each other's mercy, the first sensation he was always conscious of was the degree to which she bored him. He remembered the day years ago, long before their divorce, when it had first come home to him, that she was always going to bore him. But he was ashamed to think of that now, and went on more patiently. You see, the situation is rather different from anything we've known before. And after all, in 1870, all the wise people thought till the last minute that there would be no war. Her delicate face seemed to shrink and wither with apprehension. Then what about George, she asked, the paint coming out around her haggard eyes. Campton paused a moment. You may suppose I've thought of that. Oh, of course. He saw she was honestly trying to be what a mother should be in talking of her only child to that child's father. But the long habit of superficiality made her stammering and inarticulate when her one deep feeling tried to rise to the surface. Campton seated himself again, taking care to choose a straightback chair. I see nothing to worry about with regard to George, he said. You mean why they won't take him? They won't want him with his medical record. Are you sure? He's so much stronger. He's gained 20 pounds. It was terrible, really, to hear her avow it in a reluctant whisper. That was the view that war made mothers take of the chief blessing they could ask for their children. Campton understood her and took the same view. George's wonderful recovery, the one joy his parents had shared in the last 20 years, was now a misfortune to be denied and assembled. They looked at each other like accomplices, the same thought in their eyes. If only the boy had been born in America. It was grotesque that the whole of joy or anguish should suddenly be found to hang on a geographical accident. After all, we're Americans. This is not our job, Campton began. No, he saw she was waiting and knew for what. So, of course, if there were any trouble, but there won't be. If there were, though, I shouldn't hesitate to do what was necessary. Use any influence. Oh, then we agree, broke from her in a cry of wonder. The unconscious irony of the exclamation struck him and increased his irritation. He remembered the tone, undefinably compassionate, in which Dastry had said, I perfectly understand a foreigner's taking that view. But was he a foreigner, Campton asked himself, and what was the criterion of citizenship, if he, who owed to France everything that had made life worthwhile, could regard himself as owing her nothing, now that for the first time, he might have something to give her. Well, for himself, that argument was all right. Preposterous as he thought, war, any war, he would have offered himself to France on the instant if she had had any use for his lame carcass. But he had never bargained to give her his only son. Mrs. Brandt went on in excited argument. Of course, you know how careful I always am to do nothing about him without consulting you. But since you feel about it as we do, she blushed under her faint rouge. The we had slipped out accidentally, and Campton, aware of turning hard lipped and grim, sat waiting for her to repair the blunder. Through the years of his poverty, it had been impossible not to put up on occasions with that odious first-person plural. As long as his wretched inability to make money had made it necessary that his wife's second husband should pay for his son's keep, such allusions had been part of Campton's long expiation. But even then, he had tacitly made his former wife understand that when they had to talk of the boy. He could bear her saying, I think, or Anderson thinks this or that, but not we think it. And in the last few years, since Campton's unforeseen success had put him to the astonishment of everyone concerned in a position of financial independence, Anderson had almost entirely dropped out of their talk about George's future. Mrs. Brandt was not a clever woman, but she had a social adroitness that sometimes took the place of intelligence. On this occasion, she saw her mistake so quickly and blushed for it so painfully that at any other time, Campton would have smiled away her distress. But at the moment, he could not stir a muscle to help her. Look here, he broke out. There are things I've had to accept in the past and shall have to accept in the future. The boy is to go to Bullard and Brandt's. It's agreed. I'm not sure enough of being able to provide for him for the next few years to interfere with your plans in that respect. But I thought it was understood. Once and for all, she interrupted him excitedly. Oh, of course. Of course. You must admit I've always respected your feeling. He acknowledged awkwardly. Yes. Well, then, won't you see that this situation is different, terribly different, and that we ought all to work together? If Anderson's influence can be of use, Anderson's influence, Campton's gorge rose against the phrase. It was always Anderson's influence that had been invoked, and none knew better than Campton himself how justly when the boy's future was under discussion. But in this particular case, the suggestion was intolerable. Of course, he interrupted dryly. But as it happens, I think I can attend to this job myself. She looked down at her huge rings, hesitated visibly, and then flung tacked to the winds. What makes you think so? You don't know the right sort of people. It was a long time since she had thrown that at him, not since the troubled days of their marriage when it had been the cruelest taunt she could think of. Now it struck him simply as a particularly unpalatable truce. No, he didn't know the right sort of people. Unless, for instance, among his new patrons, such a man as Juergenstein answered to the description. But if there were war, on what side would a cosmopolitan like Juergenstein turn out to be? Anderson, you see, she persisted losing sight of everything in the need to lull her fears. Anderson knows all the political people. In a business way, of course, a big banker has to. If there's really any chance of Georgia's being taken, you've no right to refuse Anderson's help. None whatever. Captain was silent. He had meant to reassure her, to reaffirm his conviction that the boy was sure to be discharged. But as their eyes met, he saw that she believed this no more than he did, and he felt the contagion of her incredulity. But if you are so sure there's not going to be war, he began. As he spoke, he saw her face change and was aware that the door behind him had opened and that a short man, bald and slim, was advancing at a sort of mincing trot across the pompous garlands of the Cervonnerie carpet. Captain got to his feet. He had expected Anderson Brandt to stop at sight of him, mumble a greeting, and then back out of the room as usual. But Anderson Brandt did nothing of the sort. He merely hastened his trot toward the tea table. He made no attempt to shake hands with Captain, but bowing shyly and stiffly said, I understood you were coming and hurried back on the chance to consult. Captain gazed at him without speaking. They had not seen each other since the extraordinary occasion two years before when Mr. Brandt, furtively one day at dusk, had come to his studio to offer to buy George's portrait. And as their eyes met, the memory of that visit reddened both their faces. Mr. Brandt was a compact little man of about 60. His sandy hair just turning gray was brushed forward over a baldness which was ivory white at the crown and became brick pink above the temples before merging into the tanned and freckled surface of his face. He was always dressed in carefully cut clothes of a discreet gray with a tie to match in which even the plump pearl was gray so that he reminded Captain of a dry perpendicular insect in protective tints. And the fancy was encouraged by his cautious manner and the way he had of peering over his glasses as if they were part of his armor. His feet were small and pointed and seemed to be made of patent leather and shaking hands with him was like clasping a bunch of twigs. It had been Captain's lot on the rare occasions of his meeting, Mr. Brandt, always to see this perfectly balanced man in moments of disequilibrium when the attempt to simulate poise probably made him more rigid than nature had created him. But today his perturbation betrayed itself in the gesture with which he drummed out a tune on the back of the gold and platinum cigar case he had unconsciously drawn from his pocket. After a moment he seemed to become aware of what he had in his hand and pressing the sapphire spring held out the case with a remark, coronas. Captain made a movement of refusal and Mr. Brandt overwhelmed thrust the guitar case away. I ought to have taken one. I may need him, Captain thought. And Mrs. Brandt said addressing her husband, he thinks as we do, exactly. Captain winced, thinking as the Brandts did was at all times so foreign to his nature and his principles that his first impulse was to protest. But the sight of Mr. Brandt standing there helplessly and trying to hide the twitching of his lip by stroking his lavender-scented moustache with a discreetly curved hand moved the painter's imagination. Poor devil, he'd give all his millions if the boy were safe, he thought and he doesn't even dare to say so. It satisfied Captain's sense of his rights that these two powerful people were hanging on his decision like frightened children and he answered, looking at Mrs. Brandt, there's nothing to be done present, absolutely nothing. Except, he added abruptly, to take care not to talk in this way to George. Mrs. Brandt lifted a startled gaze. What do you mean? If war is declared, you can't expect me not to speak of it to him. Speak of it as much as you like, but don't drag him in. Let him work out his own case for himself. He went on with an effort. It's what I intend to do. But you said you'd use every influence, she protested obtusely. Well, I believe this is one of them. She looked down resignedly at her clasped hands and he saw her lips tighten. My telling her that has been just enough to start her on the other tack. He groaned to himself, all her old stupidities rising up around him like a fog. Mr. Brandt gave a slight cough and removed his protecting hand from his lips. Mr. Campton is right, he said, quickly and timorously. I take the same view entirely. George must not know that we are thinking of using any means. He coughed again and groped for the cigar case. As he spoke, there came over Campton a sense of their possessing a common ground of understanding that Campton had never found in his wife. He had had a hint of the same feeling, but had voluntarily stifled it on the day when Mr. Brandt, apologetic yet determined, had come to the studio to buy George's portrait. Campton had seen then how the man suffered from his failure but had chosen to attribute his distress to the humiliation of finding there were things his money could not purchase. Now that judgment seemed as unimaginative as he had once thought Mr. Brandt's overture. Campton turned on the banker a look that was almost brotherly. We men know, the look said, and Mr. Brandt's parched cheek was suffused with a flush of understanding. Then, as if frightened at the consequences of such complicity, he repeated his bow and went out. When Campton issued forth into the Avenue Marignier, it came to him as a surprise to see the old unheeding life of Paris still going on. In the golden decline of day, the usual throng of idlers sat under the horse chestnuts of the Champs-Élysées. Children scampered between turf and flowers and the perpetual stream of motors rolled up the central avenue to the restaurants beyond the gates. Under the last trees of the Avenue Gabriel, the painter stood looking across the Place de la Concorde. No doubt the future was dark. He had guessed from Mr. Brandt's precipitate arrival that the banks and the stock exchange feared the worst. But what could a man do whose convictions were so largely formed by the play of things on his retina when in the setting sun, all that majesty of space and light and architecture was spread out before him undisturbed? Paris was too triumphant a fact not to argue down his fears. There she lay in the security of her beauty and once more proclaimed herself eternal. End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 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 3. The night was so lovely that though the Boulogne Express arrived late George at once proposed dining in the bois. His luggage, of which as usual there was a good deal, was dropped at the creon and they shot up the Champs Elysees as the summer dusk began to be pricked by lamps. How jolly the old place smells, George cried, breathing in the scent of sun-warmed asphalt of flower beds and freshly watered dust. He seemed as much alive to such impressions as if his first word at the station had not been, well, this time I suppose we're in for it. In for it they might be, but meanwhile he meant to enjoy the scents and scenes of Paris as acutely and unconsernedly as ever. Campton had hoped that he would pick out one of the humble cyclists' restaurants near the same, but not he. Café Madrid, he said gaily as the taxi turned into the bois and there they sat under the illuminated trees in the general glitter and expansiveness. With the zigan drowning out their talk and all around them painted faces that seemed to the father so old and obvious and to the son no doubt so full of novelty and mystery. The music made conversation difficult, but Campton did not care. It was enough to sit and watch the face in which after each absence he noted a new and richer vivacity. He had often tried to make up his mind if his boy were handsome. Not that the father's eye influenced the painters, but George's young head with its thick blonde thatch, the complexion ruddy to the golden eyebrows and then abruptly white on the forehead, the short, amused nose, the inquisitive eyes, the ears lying back flat to the skull against curly edges of fair hair. All defied rules and escaped all classifications by a mixture of romantic gait and shrewd plainness, like that in certain 18th century portraits. Father and son faced each other over the piled up peaches while the last sparkle of champagne died down in their glasses. Campton's thoughts went back to the day when he had first discovered his son. George was a schoolboy of twelve at home for the Christmas holidays. At home meant at the Brantz since it was always there he stayed. His father saw him only on certain days. Usually Mariette fetched him to the studio on one afternoon in the week. But this particular week George was ill and it had been arranged that in case of illness his father was to visit him at his mother's. He had one of his frequent bad colds and Campton recalled him propped up in bed in his luxurious overheated room, a scarlet sweater over his night shirt, a book on his thin knees, and his ugly little fever flushed face bent over it in profound absorption. Till that moment George had never seemed to care for books. His father had resigned himself to the probability of seeing him grow up into the ordinary pleasant young fellow with his mother's worldly tastes. But the boy was reading as only a bookworm reads, reading with his very fingertips and his inquisitive nose and the perpetual dart ahead of a gaze that seemed to guess each phrase from its last word. He looked up with a smile and said, Oh, dad. But it was clear that he regarded the visit as an interruption. Campton leaned over, saw that the book was the first edition of Levengro. Where the juice did you get that? George looked at him with shining eyes. Didn't you know? Mr. Brandt has started collecting first editions. There's a chap who comes over from London with things for him. He lets me have them to look at when I'm seedy. I say, isn't this topping? Do you remember the fight? And marveling once more at the ways of Providence, Campton perceived that the millionaire's taste for owning books had awakened in his stepson a taste for reading them. I couldn't have done that for him. The father had reflected with secret bitterness. It was not that a bibliophile's library was necessary to develop a taste for letters, but that Campton himself, being a small reader, had few books about him and had usually borrowed those few. If George had lived with him, he might never have guessed the boy's latent hunger for the need of books as part of one's daily food would scarcely have presented itself to him. From that day, he and George had understood each other. Initiation had come to them in different ways, but their ardor for beauty had the same root. The visible world and its transposition in terms of one art or another were thereafter the subject of their interminable talks. And Campton, with a passionate interest, watched his son absorbing through books what had mysteriously reached him through his paintbrush. They had been parted often and for long periods, first by George's schooling in England, next by his French military service, begun at 18 to facilitate his entry into Harvard, finally by his sojourn at the university. But whenever they were together, they seemed to make up in the first 10 minutes for the longest separation. And since George had come of age and been his own master, he had given his father every moment he could spare. His career at Harvard had been interrupted after two years by the symptoms of tuberculosis, which had necessitated his being hurried off to the Alps. He had returned completely cured, and at his own wish had gone back to Harvard. And having finished his course and taken his degree, he had now come out to join his father on a long holiday before entering the New York banking house of Bullard and Brandt. Campton, looking at the boy's bright head across the lights and flowers, thought how incredibly stupid it was to sacrifice an hour of such a life to the routine of money-getting. But he had had that question out with himself once and for all, and was not going to return to it. His own success, if it lasted, would eventually help him to make George independent. But meanwhile he had no right to interfere with the boy's business training. He had hoped that George would develop some marked talent, some irresistible tendency which would decide his future too definitely for interference. But George was twenty-five, and no such call had come to him. Apparently he was fated to be only a delighted spectator and commentator, to enjoy and interpret, not to create. And Campton knew that this absence of a special bent with the strain and absorption it implies gave the boy his peculiar charm. The trouble was that it made him the prey of other people's plans for him. And now all these plans, Campton's dreams for the future, as well as the business arrangements which were Mr. Brandt's contribution, might be wrecked by tomorrow's news from Berlin. The possibility still seemed unthinkable, but in spite of his incredulity, the evil shadow hung on him, as he and his son chatted of political issues. George made no allusion to his own case. His whole attitude was so dispassionate that his father began to wonder if he had not solved the question by concluding that he would not pass the medical examination. The tone he took was that the whole affair from the point of view of 20th century civilization was too monstrous and incongruity for something not to put a stop to it at the 11th hour. His easy optimism at first stimulated his father, and then began to jar on him. Dastry doesn't think it can be stopped, Campton said at length. The boy smiled. Dear old Dastry, no, I suppose not, that after sedan generation have got the inevitability of war in their bones, they've never been able to get beyond it. Our view is different. We're internationals, whether we want to be or not. To begin with, his father interposed, if by our view you mean yours in mind, you and I haven't a drop of French blood in us, and we can never really know what the French feel on such matters. George looked at him affectionately. Oh, but I didn't, I mean, we, in the sense of my generation, of whatever nationality. I know French chaps who feel as I do. Louis Dastry, Paul's nephew for one, and lots of English ones. They don't believe the world will ever stand for another war. It's too stupidly uneconomic to begin with. I suppose you've read Angel, then life's worth too much, and nowadays too many millions of people know it. That's the way we all feel. Think of everything that counts, art and science and poetry and all the rest, going to smash at the nod of some doddering diplomatist. It was different in old times when the best of life for the immense majority was never anything but plague, pestilence, and famine. People are too healthy and well-fed now. They're not going off to die in a ditch to oblige anybody. Campton looked away, and his eyes, straying over the crowd, lit on the long, heavy face of Fortalec Lus, seated with a group of men on the other side of the garden. Why had it never occurred to him before that if there was one being in the world who could get George discharged, it was the great specialist under whose care he had been? Suppose war does come, the father thought. What if I were to go over and tell him I'll paint his dancer? He stood up and made his way between the tables. Fortalec Lus was dining with a party of jaded-looking politicians and journalists. To reach him, Campton had to squeeze past another table at which a fair, worn-looking lady sat beside a handsome old man with a dazzling mane of white hair and a grand officer's rosette of the Legion of Honor. Campton bowed, and the lady whispered something to her companion who returned a stately, vacant salute. Poor old Bossit, dining alone with his much wronged and all-forgiving wife, bowing to the people she told him to bow to and placidly murmuring war, war, as he stuck his fork into the peach she had peeled. At Fortin's table, the faces were less placid. The men greeted Campton with a deference which was not lost on Madame Bossit, and the painter bent close over Fortin, embarrassed at the idea that she might overhear him. If I can make time for a sketch, will you bring your dancing lady tomorrow? The physician's eyes lit up under their puffy lids. My dear friend, will I, she simply set her heart on it. He drew out his watch and added, But why not tell her the good news yourself? You told me, I think, that you'd never seen her. This is her last night at the Posada, and if you'll jump into my motor, we shall be just in time to see her come on. Campton beckoned to George, and father and son followed Fortin le Cluz. None of the three men, on the way back to Paris, made any reference to the war. The physician asked George a few medical questions, and complimented him on his look of recovered health. Then the talk strayed to studios and theaters, where Fortin le Cluz firmly kept it. The last faint rumors of the conflict died out on the threshold of the Posada. It would have been hard to discern in the crowded audience any appearance but that of ordinary pleasure seekers momentarily stirred by a new sensation. Collectively, fashionable Paris was already away at the seashore or in the mountains, but not a few of its chief ornaments still lingered, as the procession through Campton studio had proved. And others had returned, drawn back by doubts about the future, the desire to be nearer the source of news, the irresistible French craving for the forum and the market, when messengers are foaming in. The public of the Posada therefore was still Parisian enough to flatter the new dancer, and on all the pleasure-tired faces belonging to every type of money-getters and amusement-seekers, Campton saw only the old, familiar music hall look, the look of a house with lights blazing and windows wide, but nobody and nothing within. The usualness of it all gave him a sense of ease which his boy's enjoyment confirmed, George lounging on the edge of their box and watching the yellow dancer with a clear-eyed interest refreshingly different from Fortin's tarnished gaze. George so fresh and cool and unafraid seemed to prove that a world which could produce such youths would never again settle its differences by the bloody madness of war. Gradually, Campton became absorbed in the dancer and began to observe her with the concentration he brought to bear on any subject that attracted his brush. He saw that she was more paintable than he could have hoped, though not in the extravagant dress and attitude he was sure her eminent admirer would prefer, but rather as a little crouching animal against a sun-baked wall. He smiled at the struggle he should have when the question of costume came up. Well, I'll do her, if you like, he turned to say, and two tears of senile triumph glittered on the physician's cheeks. Tomorrow, then, at two. May I bring her then? She leaves as soon as possible for the south. She lives on sun, heat, radiance. Tomorrow, yes, Campton nodded. His decision once reached, the whole subject bored him, and in spite of Fortin's entreaties he got up and signaled to George. As they strolled home through the brilliant midnight streets, the boy said, Did I hear you tell old Fortin you were going to do his dancer? Yes, why not? She's very paintable, said Campton, abruptly shaken out of his security. Beginning tomorrow? And why not? Come, you know, tomorrow. George laughed. We'll see his father rejoined with an obscure sense that if he went on steadily enough, doing his usual job, it might somehow divert the current of events. On the threshold of the hotel, they were waylaid by an elderly man with a round face and round eyes behind gold eyeglasses. His gray hair was cut in a fringe over his guile-less forehead, and he was dressed in expensive evening clothes and shone with soap and shaving. But the anxiety of a frightened child puckered his innocent brow and twitching cheeks. My dear Campton, the very man I've been hunting for. You remember me, your cousin Harvey Mayhew of Utica? Campton, with an effort, remembered and asked what he could do, inwardly hoping it was not a portrait. Oh, the simplest thing in the world. You see, I'm here as a delegate. At Campton's look of inquiry, Mr. Mayhew interrupted himself to explain. To the Peace Congress at the Hague. Why, yes, naturally. I landed only this morning and find myself in the middle of all this rather foolish excitement and unable to make out just how I can reach my destination. My time is valuable, and it is very unfortunate that all this commotion should be allowed to interfere with our work. It would be most annoying if after having made the effort to break away from Utica, I should arrive too late for the opening of the Congress. Campton looked at him wonderingly. Then you're going anyhow. Going? Why not? You surely don't think Mr. Mayhew threw back his shoulders pink and impressive. I shouldn't, in any case, allow anything so opposed to my convictions as war to interfere with my carrying out my mandate. All I want is to find out the route least likely to be closed if this monstrous thing should happen. Campton considered. Well, if I were you, I should go round by Luxembourg. It's longer, but you'll be out of the way of trouble. He gave a nod of encouragement, and the peace delegate thanked him profusely. Father and son were lodged on the top floor of the crayon in the little apartment which opens on the broad terraced roof. Campton had wanted to put before his boy one of the city's most perfect scenes, and when they reached their sitting room George went straight out onto the terrace and, leaning on the parapet, called back, oh, don't go to bed yet. It's too jolly. Campton followed, and the two stood looking down on the festal expanse of the Place de la Concorde, strewn with great flower clusters of lights between its pearly distances. The sky was full of stars, pale, remote, half-drowned in the city's vast illumination, and the foliage of the Champs-Elysées and the Tuileries made masses of mysterious darkness behind the statues and the flushing fountains. For a long time, neither father nor son spoke, then Campton said, are you game to start? The day after tomorrow? George waited a moment. For Africa? Well, my idea would be to push straight through to the south, as far as Palermo say. All this cloudy, watery loveliness gives me a furious appetite for violent red earth and white houses crackling in the glare. George again pondered. Then he said, it sounds first rate, but if you're so sure we're going to start, why did you tell Fortin to bring that girl tomorrow? Campton, reddening in the darkness, felt as if his son's clear eyes were following the motions of his blood. Had George suspected why he had wanted to ingratiate himself with the physician? It was stupid. I'll put her off, he muttered. He dropped into an arm chair and sat there in his clumsy infirm attitude, his arms folded behind his head while George continued to lean on the parapet. The boy's question had put an end to their talk by bearing the throbbing nerve of his father's anxiety. If war were declared the next day, what did George mean to do? There was every hope of his obtaining his discharge, but would he lend himself to the attempt? The deadly fear of crystallizing his son's refusal by forcing him to put it into words kept Campton from asking the question. End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 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 4. The evening was too beautiful and too full of the sense of fate for sleep to be possible. And long after George had finally said, all the same I think I'll turn in, his father sat on listening to the gradual subsidence of the traffic and watching the night widen above Paris. As he sat there, discouragement overcame him. His last plan, his plan for getting George finally and completely over to his side was going to fail as all his other plans had failed. If there were war, there would be no more portraits to paint and his vision of wealth would vanish as visions of love and happiness and comradeship had one by one faded away. Nothing had ever succeeded with him, but the thing he had in some moods set least store by the dogged achievement of his brush. And just as that was about to assure his happiness, here was this horrible world catastrophe threatening to fall across his path. His misfortune had been that he could neither get on easily with people nor live without them, could never wholly isolate himself in his art nor yet resign himself to any permanent human communion that left it out or, worse still, dragged it in irrelevantly. He had tried both kinds and on the whole preferred the first. His marriage, his stupid ill-fated marriage, had, after all, not been the most disenchanting of his adventures because Julia Ambrose, when she married him, had made no pretense of espousing his art. He had seen her first in the tumbledown Venetian palace where she lived with her bachelor uncle, old Horace Ambrose, who dabbled in bric-a-brac and cultivated a guileless bohemianism. Campton, looking back, could still understand why to a youth fresh from Utica at odds with his father, unwilling to go into the family business and strangling with violent, unexpressed ideas on art and the universe, why marriage with Julia Ambrose had seemed so perfect a solution. She had been brought up abroad by her parents, a drifting and impecunious American couple, and after their deaths, within a few months of each other, her education had been completed at her uncle's expense in a fashionable Parisian convent. Then she had been transplanted at 19 to his Venetian household and all the ideas that most terrified and scandalized Campton's family were part of the only air she had breathed. She had never intentionally feigned an exaggerated interest in his ambitions, but her bringing up made her regard them as natural. She knew what he was aiming at, though she had never understood his reasons for trying. The jargon of art was merely one of her many languages, but she talked it so fluently that he had taken it for her mother tongue. The only other girls he had known well were his sisters, Ernest Eyeglass, young women, whose one answer to all his problems was that he ought to come home. The idea of Europe had always been terrifying to them, and indeed to his whole family, since the extraordinary misadventure whereby, as the result of a protracted diligence journey over bad roads of a violent thunderstorm and a delayed steamer, Campton had been born in Paris instead of Utica. Mrs. Campton, the elder, had taken the warning to heart and never again left her native soil. But the sisters, safely and properly brought into the world in their own city and state, had always felt that Campton's persistent yearnings for Europe and his inexplicable detachment from Utica and the mango were mysteriously due to the accident of their mother's premature confinement. Compared with the admonitions of these domestic censors, Miss Ambrose's innocent conversation was as seductive as the tangles of Neyaira's hair. And it used to be a joke between them, one of the few he had ever been able to make her see, that he, the raw upstater, was Parisian-born while she, the glass, and pattern of worldly knowledge had seen the light in the pure atmosphere of Madison Avenue. Through her, in due course, he came to know another girl, a queer, abrupt young American, already an old maid at 22, and an open revolt against her family for reasons not unlike his own. Adele Anthony had come abroad to keep house for a worthless, artistic brother who was preparing to be a sculptor by prolonged sessions in Anglo-American bars and the lobbies of music halls. When he finally went under and was shipped home, Miss Anthony stayed on in Paris, ashamed, as she told Campton, to go back and face the righteous triumph of a family connection who had unanimously disbelieved in the possibility of making Bill Anthony into a sculptor, and in the wisdom of his sisters staking her small means on the venture. Somehow behind it all, I was right, and they were wrong, but to do anything with poor Bill, I ought to have been able to begin two or three generations back, she confessed. Miss Anthony had many friends in Paris, of whom Julia Ambrose was the most admired, and she had assisted sympathizingly, if not enthusiastically, at Campton's wooing of Julia and their hasty marriage. Her only note of warning had been the reminder that Julia had always been poor and had always lived as if she were rich, and that was silenced by Campton's rejoinder that the magic mangle to which the Campton prosperity was due was someday going to make him rich, though he had always lived as if he were poor. Well, you'd better not any longer, Adele sharply advised, and he laughed and promised to go out and buy a new hat. In truth, careless of comfort as he was, he adored luxury in women and was resolved to let his wife ruin him if she did it handsomely enough. Doubtless she might have had fate given her time, but soon after their marriage old Mr. Campton died, and it was found that a trusted manager had so invested the profits of the mangle that the heirs inherited only a series of lawsuits. John Campton henceforth was merely the unsuccessful son of a ruined manufacturer. Painting became a luxury he could no longer afford, and his mother and sisters besought him to come back and take over what was left of the business. It seemed so clearly his duty that with anguish of soul he prepared to go. But Julia, on being consulted, developed a sudden passion for art and poverty. We'd have to live in Utica for some years at any rate? Well, yes, no doubt. They faced the fact desolately. They'd much better look out for another manager. What do you know about business? Since you've taken up painting you'd better try to make a success of that, she advised him, and he was too much of the same mind not to agree. It was not long before George's birth and they were fully resolved to go home for the event and thus spare their hoped for heir the inconvenience of coming into the world like his father in a foreign country. But now this was not to be thought of, and the eventual inconvenience to George was lost sight of by his progenitors in the contemplation of nearer problems. For a few years their life dragged along shabbily and depressingly. Now that Campton's painting was no longer an amateur's hobby but a domestic obligation, Julia thought it her duty to interest herself in it and her only idea of doing so was by means of what she called relations, using the word in its French and diplomatic sense. She was convinced that her husband's lack of success was due to Bossit's blighting epigram and to Campton's subsequent resolve to strike out for himself. It's a great mistake to try to be original till people have gotten used to you, she said, with the shrewdness that sometimes startled him. If you'd only been civil to Bossit he would have ended by taking you up and then you could have painted as clearly as you liked. Bossit by this time had succumbed to the honors which lie in wait for such talents and in his stard and titled maturity his earlier dread of rivals had given way to a prudent benevolence. Young artists were always welcome at the receptions he gave in his sumptuous hotel of the Avenue du Bois. Those who threatened to be rivals were even invited to dine and Julia was justified in triumphing when such an invitation finally rewarded her efforts. Campton with a laugh threw the card into the stove. If you'd only understand that that's not the way he said. What is then? Why letting all that lot see what unutterable rubbish one thinks them? I should have thought you'd tried that long enough, she said with pale lips. But he answered jovially that it never paled on him. She was bitterly offended but she knew Campton by this time and was not a woman to waste herself in vain resentment. She simply suggested that since he would not profit by Boisette's advance the only alternative was to try to get orders for portraits. And though at that stage he was not in the mood for portrait painting he made an honest attempt to satisfy her. She began, of course, by sitting for him. She sat again and again but lovely as she was he was not inspired and one day in sheer self-defense he blurted out that she was not paintable. She never forgot the epithet and it loomed large in their subsequent recriminations. Adele Anthony, it was just like her, gave him his first order and she did prove paintable. Campton made a success of her long crooked pink-nosed face but she didn't perceive it. She had wanted something oval with a tool and a rose in a tapered hand. And after heroically facing the picture for six months she hid it away in an attic whence a year or so before the date of the artist's present musings it had been fished out as an early Campton to be exhibited half a dozen times and have articles written about it in the leading art reviews. Adele's picture acted as an awful warning to intending patrons and after one or two attempts at depicting mistrustful friends Campton refused to constrain his muse and no more was said of portrait painting. But life in Paris was growing too expensive. He persuaded Julia to try Spain and they wandered about there for a year. She was not fault-finding. She did not complain but she hated traveling. She could not eat things cooked in oil and his pictures seemed to her to be growing more and more ugly and unsalable. Finally they came one day to Ronda after a trying sojourn at Cordeva. In the train Julia had moaned a little at the mosquitoes of the previous night and at the heat and dirt of the second-class compartment. Then always conscious of the ill-breeding of fretfulness she had bent her lovely head above Hartoknitz's book and it was then that Campton looking out of the window to avoid her fatally familiar profile had suddenly discovered another. It was that of a peasant girl in front of a small whitewashed house under a white pergola hung with bunches of big red peppers. The house which was close to the railway was propped against an orange-colored rock and in the glare cast up from the red earth its walls looked as blue as snow in shadow. The girl was all blue-white too from her cotton skirt to the kerchief knotted turban-wise above two folds of blue-black hair. Her round forehead and merry nose were relieved like a bronze medallion against the wall and she stood with her hands on her hips laughing at a little pig asleep under a cork tree who lay on his side like a dog. The vision filled the carriage window and then vanished but it remained so sharply impressed on Campton that even then he knew what was going to happen. He leaned back with a sense of relief and forgot everything else. The next morning he said to his wife, there's a little place up the line that I want to go back and paint. You don't mind staying here a day or two, do you? She said she did not mind. It was what she always said but he was somehow aware that this was the particular grievance she had always been waiting for. He did not care for that or for anything but getting a seat in the diligence which started every morning for the village nearest the White House. On the way he remembered that he had left Julia only 40 posettas but he did not care about that either. He stayed a month and when he returned to Ronda his wife had gone back to Paris leaving a letter to say that the matter was in the hands of her lawyers. What did you do it for? I mean in that particular way. For goodness knows I understand all the rest. Adele Anthony had once asked him while the divorce proceedings were going on and he had shaken his head conscious that he could not explain. It was a year or two later that he met the first person who did understand a Russian lady who had heard the story was curious to know him and asked one day when their friendship had progressed to see the sketches he had brought back from his fugue. Comme je vous comprends she had murmured her gray eyes deep in his but perceiving that she did not allude to the sketches but to his sentimental adventure Campton pushed the drawings out of sight vexed with himself for having shown them. He forgave the Russian lady her artistic obtuseness for the sake of her human comprehension. They had met at the loneliest moment of his life when his art seemed to have failed him like everything else and when the struggle to get possession of his son which had been going on in the courts ever since the break with Julia had finally been decided against him. His Russian friend consoled, amused and agitated him. And after a few years drifted out of his life as irresponsibly as she had drifted into it and he found himself at 45 a lonely thwarted man as full as ever of faith in his own powers but with little left in human nature or in opportunity. It was about this time that he heard that Julia was to marry again and that his boy would have a stepfather. He knew that even his own family thought it the best thing that could happen. They were tired of clubbing together to pay Julia's alimony and heaved a united sigh of relief when they learned that her second choice had fallen not on the bankrupt foreign count they had always dreaded but on the Paris partner of the famous bank of Bullard and Brandt. Mr. Brandt's request that his wife's alimony should be discontinued gave him a moral superiority which even Campton's recent successes could not shake. It was felt that the request expressed the contempt of an income easily counted in seven figures for a pittance painfully screwed up to four and the Camptons admired Mr. Brandt much more for not needing their money than for refusing it. Their attitude left John Campton without support in his struggle to keep a hold on his boy. His family sincerely thought George safer with the Brandts than with his own father and the father could advance to the contrary no arguments they would have understood. All the forces of order seemed leagued against him and it was perhaps this fact that suddenly drove him into conformity with them. At any rate, from the day of Julia's remarriage no other woman shared her former husband's life. Campton settled down to the solitude of his dusty studio at Montmartre and painted doggedly all his thoughts on George. At this point in his reminiscences the bells of Saint-Claude rang out the half hour after midnight and Campton rose and went into the darkened sitting room. The door into George's room was open and in the silence his father heard the boy's calm breathing. A light from the bathroom cast its ray on the dressing table which was scattered with the contents of George's pockets. Campton, dwelling with a new tenderness on everything that belonged to his son, noticed a smart antelope card case. George had his mother's weakness for bond street novelties. A wristwatch, his studs, a bundle of banknotes and beside these a thumbed and dirty red book size of a large pocket diary. The father wondered what it was then of a sudden he knew. He had once seen Madame Lebel's grandson pull just such a red book from his pocket as he was leaving for his 28 days of military service. It was the livre militaire that every French citizen under 48 carries about with him. Campton had never paid much attention to French military regulations. George's service over he had dismissed the matter from his mind forgetting that his son was still a member of the French army and as closely linked to the fortunes of France as the grandson of the concierge of Montmartre. Now it occurred to him that that little red book would answer the questions he had not dared to put and stealing in he possessed himself of it and carried it back to the sitting room. There he sat down by the lamp and read. First George's name, his domicile, his rank as a maréchal de logis of dragoons, the number of his regiment and its base, all that was already familiar. But what was this on the next page? In case of general mobilization announced to the populations of France by public proclamations or by notices posted in the streets the bearer of this order is to rejoin his regiment at blank. He is to take with him provisions for one day. He is to present himself at the station of blank on the third day of mobilization at six o'clock and to take the train indicated by the station master. The days of mobilization are counted from zero o'clock to 24 o'clock. The first day is that on which the order of mobilization is published. Campton dropped the book and pressed his hands to his temples. The days of mobilization are counted from zero o'clock to 24 o'clock. The first day is that on which the order of mobilization is published. Then if France mobilized that day George would start the second day after at six in the morning. George might be going to leave him within 48 hours from that very moment. Campton had always vaguely supposed that some day or other if war came a telegram would call George to his base. It had never occurred to him that every detail of the boy's military life had long since been regulated by the dread power which had him in its grasp. He read the next paragraph. The bearer will travel free of charge and thought with a grin how it would annoy Anderson Brandt that the French government should presume to treat his stepson as if he could not pay his way. The plump bundle of bank notes on the dressing table seemed to look with ineffectual scorn at the red book that sojourned so democratically in the same pocket. And Campton picturing George jammed into an overcrowded military train on the plebeian wooden seat of a third class compartment grinned again forgetful of his own anxiety in the vision of Brandt's exasperation. Well, it wasn't war yet, whatever they said. He carried the red book back to the dressing table. The light falling across the bed drew his eye to the young face on the pillow. George lay on his side, one arm above his head, the other laxly stretched along the bed. He had thrown off the blankets and the sheet, clinging to his body, modeled his slim flank and legs as he lay in dreamless rest. For a long time, Campton stood gazing. Then he stole back to the sitting room, picked up a sketchbook and pencil, and returned. He knew there was no danger of waking George, and he began to draw eagerly but deliberately fascinated by the happy accident of the lighting and of the boy's position. Like a statue of a young knight I've seen somewhere, he said to himself, vexed and surprised that he, whose plastic memories were always so precise, should not remember where. And then his pencil stopped. What he had really thought was, like the effigy of a young knight. Though he had instinctively changed the word as it formed itself, he leaned in the doorway, the sketchbook in hand, and continued to gaze at his son. It was the clinging sheet, no doubt, that gave him that look and the white glare of the electric burner. If war came, that was just the way a boy might lie on a battlefield, or afterward in a hospital bed, not his boy, thank heaven, but very probably his boy's friends, hundreds and thousands of boys like his boy, the age of his boy with a laugh like his boy's, the wicked waste of it. Well, that was what war meant, what tomorrow might bring to millions of parents like himself. He stiffened his shoulders and opened the sketchbook again. What watery stuff was he made of, he wondered, just because the boy lay as if he were posing for a tombstone. What if Signorelli, who had sat at his dead son's side and drawn him tenderly, minutely, while the coffin waited? Well, damn Signorelli, that was all. Campton threw down his book, turned out the sitting room lights, and limped away to bed. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 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 5 The next morning he said to George over coffee on the terrace, I think I'll drop in at Cook's about our tickets. George nodded, munching his golden roll. Right, I'll run up to see Mother then. His father was silent. Inwardly, he was saying to himself, the chances are she'll be going back to Deauville this afternoon. There had not been much to gather from the newspapers heaped at their feet. Austria had ordered general mobilization, but while the tone of the dispatchers was nervous and contradictory, that of the leading articles remained almost ominously reassuring. Campton absorbed the reassurance without heeding its quality. It was a drug he had to have at any price. He expected the Javanese dancer to sit for him that afternoon, but he had not proposed to George to be present on the chance that things might eventually take a wrong turn. He meant to say a word to Fortan-le-Cluis and the presence of his son would have been embarrassing. He'll be back for lunch, he called to George, who still lounged on the terrace in pajamas. Rather, that is, unless Mother makes a point in case she's leaving. Oh, of course, said Campton with grim cordiality. You see, dear old boy, I've got to see Uncle Andy sometime. It was the grotesque name that George in his babyhood had given to Mr. Brandt. And when he grew up, it had been difficult to substitute another. Especially now, George added, pulling himself up out of his chair. Now? They looked at each other in silence. Irritation in the father's eye. Indulgent amusement in the son's. Why, if you and I are really off on this long trek, oh, of course, agreed Campton, relieved. You'd much better lunch with them. I always want you to do what's decent. He paused on the threshold to add, by the way, don't forget Adele. Well, rather not. His son responded, and will keep the evening free for something awful. As he left the room, he heard George rapping on the telephone and calling out Miss Anthony's number. Campton had to have reassurance at any price, and he got it, as usual, irrationally but irresistibly through his eyes. The mere fact that the midsummer sun lay so tenderly on Paris, that the bronze dolphins of the fountains in the square were spraying the Nerides Louis-Philippe Chignon as playfully as ever, that the sleepy cities of France dozed as heavily on their thrones, and the horses of Marley pranced as fractiously on their pedestals, that the glorious central setting of the city lay there in its usual mellow pomp. All this gave him a sense of security that no criss-crossing of Reuters and Havasas could shake. Nevertheless, he reflected that there was no use in battling with the silly hysterical crowd he would be sure to encounter at Cook's. And having left word with the hotel porter to secure two sleepings on the Naples Express, he drove to the studio. On the way, as his habit was, he thought hard of his model. Everything else disappeared like a rolled-up curtain, and his inner vision centered itself on the little yellow face he was to paint. Peering through her cobwebby window, he saw old Madame Lebel on the watch. He knew she wanted to pounce out and ask if there would be war, and composing his most taciturn countenance, he gave her a preoccupied nod and hurried by. The studio looked grimy and disordered, and he remembered that he had intended the evening before to come back and set it to rights. In pursuance of this plan, he got out a canvas, fussed with his brushes and colors, and then tried once more to make the place tidy. But his attempts at order always resulted in worse confusion. The fact that had been one of Julia's grievances against him, and he had often thought that a reaction from his ways probably explained the lifeless neatness of the Anderson Brant drawing room. Campton had fled to Montmartre to escape a number of things, first of all the possibility of meeting people who would want to talk about the European situation, then of being called up by Mrs. Brant, and lastly of having to lunch alone in a fashionable restaurant. In his morbid dread of seeing people, he would have preferred an omelet in his studio if only Mariette had been at hand to make it. And he decided after a vain struggle with his muddled properties to cross over to the Luxembourg quarter and pick up a meal in a wine shop. He did not own to himself the secret reason for his decision, but it caused him, after a glance at his watch, to hasten his steps down the rue Montmartre and bribe a passing taxi to carry him to the museum of the Luxembourg. He reached at ten minutes before the midday closing and hastening past the sered statues turned into a room halfway down the gallery. Whistler's mother and the Carmenceta of Sargent wondered at each other from its walls, and on the same wall with the Whistler hung the picture Campton had come for, his portrait of his son. He had given it to the Luxembourg the day after Mr. Brant had tried to buy it with the object of inflicting the most cruel slight he could think of on the banker. In the generous summer light the picture shone out on him with a communicative warmth, never had he seen so far into its depth. No wonder he thought that it opened people's eyes to what I was trying for. He stood and stared his own eyes full, mentally comparing the features before him with those of the firmer, harder George he had left on the terrace of the crayon, and noting how time, while fulfilling the rich promise of the younger face, had yet taken something from its brightness. Campton, at that moment, found more satisfaction than ever in thinking how it must have humiliated Brant to have the picture given to France. He could have understood my keeping it myself, or holding it for a bigger price, but giving it, the satisfaction was worth the sacrifice of the best record he would ever have of that phase of his son's youth. Various times afterward he had tried for the same George, but not one of his later studies had that magic light on it. Still, he was glad he had given the picture. It was safe, safer than it would have been with him. His great dread had always been that if his will were mislaid and things were always getting mislaid the picture might be sold and fall into Brant's hands after his death. The closing signal drove him out of the museum and he turned into the first wine shop. He had advised George to lunch with the Brant's, but there was disappointment in his heart. Seeing the turn things were taking he had hoped the boy would feel the impulse to remain with him, but after all, at such a time, a son could not refuse to go to his mother. Campton pictured the little party of three grouped about the luncheon table in the high, cool dining room of the Avenue Marigny with the famous Ubert Robert Panels and the Louis Kahn Silver and Sevre, while he, the father, George's father, sat alone at the soiled table of a frowsy wine shop. Well, it was he who had so willed it. Life was too crazy a muddle and who could have foreseen that he might have been repaid for 26 years with such a wife by keeping an undivided claim on such a son? His meal over, he hastened back to the studio hoping to find the dancer there. Fortin Le Clews had sworn to bring her at two and Campton was known to exact absolute punctuality. He had put the final touch to his fame by refusing to paint the mad young Duchesse Latour Cranélé who was exceptionally paintable because she had kept him waiting three quarters of an hour. But now, though it was nearly three and the dancer and her friend had not come, Campton dared not move, lest he should miss Fortin Le Clews, sent for by a rich patient in a war-funk or else hanging around in the girl's dressing room while she polishes her toenails, Campton reflected, and sulkily sat down to wait. He had never been willing to have a telephone. To him it was a live thing, a kind of Leocoon serpent that caught one in its coils and dragged one struggling to the receiver. His friends had spent all their logic in trying to argue away this belief, but he answered obstinately. Everyone would be sure to call me up whenever Mariette was out. Even the Russian lady, during her brief reign, had pleaded in vain on this point. He would have given a good deal now if he had listened to her. The terror of having to cope with small material difficulties always strongest in him in moments of artistic inspiration and the hushed universe seemed hardly big enough to hold both him and his model. This dread anchored him to his seat while he tried to make up his mind to send Madame Lebel to the nearest telephone station. If he called to her, she would instantly begin, and the war, sir, and he would have to settle that first. Besides, if he did not telephone himself, he could not make sure of another appointment with Fortin Le Clews. The idea of battling alone with the telephone in a public place covered his large body with a damp distress, if only George had been in reach. He waited till four, and then Furious locked the studio and went down. Madame Lebel still sat in her spidery den. She looked at him gravely. Their eyes met, they exchanged a bow, but she did not move or speak. She was busy as usual with some rusty sewing. He thought it odd that she should not rush out to waylay him. Everything that day was odd. He found all the telephone booths besieged. The people waiting were certainly bad cases of warfunk to judge from their looks. After scrutinizing them for a while, he decided to return to his hotel and try to communicate with Fortin Le Clews from there. To his annoyance there was not a taxi to be seen. He limped down the slope of Montmartre to the nearest metro station. And just as he was preparing to force his lame bulk into a crowded train, caught sight of a solitary horse cab, a vehicle he had not risked himself in for years. The cab driver, for gastronomic reasons, declined to take him farther than the Madeleine, and getting out there, Campton walked along the Rue Royal. Everything still looked wonderfully as usual, and the fountains in the place sparkled gloriously. Comparatively few people were about. He was surprised to see how few. A small group of them, he noticed, had paused near the doorway of the Minister of Marine and were looking without visible excitement at a white paper pasted on the wall. He crossed the street and looked too. In the middle of the paper, in queer, gothic-looking characters, he saw the words, les armées de terre et de mer. War had come. He knew now that he had never for an instant believed it possible, even when he had had that white-lipped interview with the Brantz, even when he had planned to take Fortin de Clues by his senile infatuation and secure a medical certificate for George. Even then, he had simply been obeying the superstitious impulse which makes a man carry his umbrella when he goes out on a cloudless morning. War had come. He stood on the edge of the sidewalk and tried to think, now that it was here, what it really meant, that is, what it meant to him. Beyond that, he had no intention of venturing. This is not our job anyhow, he muttered, repeating the phrase with which he had bolstered up his talk with Julia. But abstract thinking was impossible. His confused mind could only snatch at a few drifting scraps of purpose. Let's be practical, he said to himself. The first thing to do was to get back to the hotel and call up the physician. He strode along at his fastest limp, suddenly contemptuous of the people who got in his way. War, and they have nothing to do but dawdle and gape. How like the French! He found himself hating the French. He remembered that he had asked to have his sleepings engaged the following night. But even if he managed to secure his son's discharge, there could be no thought now of Georges leaving the country, and he stopped at the desk to cancel the order. There was no one behind the desk. One would have said that confusion prevailed in the hall if its emptiness had not made the word incongruous. At last, a waiter with rumpled hair strayed out of the restaurant and of him, imperiously, camped and demanded the concierge. The concierge, he's gone. To get my places for Naples, the waiter looked blank, gone, mobilized to join his regiment. It's the war. But look here, someone must have attended to getting my places, I suppose, cried camped and wrathfully. He invaded the inner office and challenged a secretary who was trying to deal with several unmanageable travelers but who explained to him, patiently, that they had certainly not been engaged as no trains were leaving Paris for the present. Not for civilian travel, he added, still more patiently. Campton had a sudden sense of suffocation. No trains leaving Paris for the present. But then people like himself, people who had nothing on earth to do with the war, had been caught like rats in a trap. He reflected with a shiver that Mrs. Brandt would not be able to deal with and would probably insist on his coming to see her every day. He asked, how long is this preposterous state of things to last? But no one answered and he stalked to the lift and had himself carried upstairs. He was confident that George would be there waiting, but the sitting room was empty. He felt as if he were on a desert island with the last sail disappearing over the dark rim of the world. After much vain ringing he got into communication with Fortin's house and heard a confused voice saying that the physician had already left Paris. Left for where? For how long? And then the eternal answer. The doctor is mobilized. It's the war. Mobilized already? Within the first 24 hours? A man of Fortin's age and authority? Campton was terrified by his many rapidity with which events were moving. He whom haste had always confused and disconcerted as if there were a secret link between his lameness and the movements of his will. He rang up Dastry, but no one answered. Evidently his friend was out and his friend's born also. I suppose she's mobilized. They'll be mobilizing the women next. At last, from sheer over agitation his fatigued mind began to move more deliberately. He collected his wits, labored with his more immediate difficulties and decided that he would go to Fortin Le Cluz's house on the chance that the physician had not, after all, really started. Ten to one he won't go till tomorrow, Campton reasoned. The hall of the hotel was emptier than ever and no taxi was in sight down the whole length of the Rue Royal or the Rue de Rivoli. Not even a horse cab showed against the deserted distances. He crossed to the metro and painfully descended its many stairs. End of Chapter 5 Recording by Chad A son at the front by Edith Orton Chapter 6 Campton, proffering 20 Franks to the astonished maid servant learned that yes to his intimates and of course once here was one the doctor was in was in fact dining and did not leave till the next morning. Dining at 6 o'clock Monsieur's son Monsieur Jean is starting at once for his depot. That's the reason Campton sent in his card. He expected to be recieved in the so-called studio. A lofty room with Chinese hangings, Renaissance choir stalls, organ, grand piano and post-impressionist paintings where Fortin Le Clues recieved the celebrities of the hour. Madame Fortin never appeared there and Campton associated the studio with amusing talk, hot-house flowers and ladies lulling on black velvet divins. He supposed that the physician was separated from his wife and that she had a home of her own. When the maid reappeared she did not lead him to the studio but into a small dining room with the traditional Henry II sideboard of waxed walnut hanging table lamp under a bed at shade an India rubber plant and a blush pedestal and napkins that were just being restored to their bone rings by the four persons seated by the red and white checkered tablecloth. These were the great man himself a tall large woman with grey hair, a tiny old lady her face framed in a peasant's flutic cap and a plain young man wearing a private's uniform who had a nose like the doctor's and simple light blue eyes. The two ladies and the young man so much more interesting to the painter's eye than the sprawling beauties of the studio were introduced by Fortin Lake-Lews as his wife his mother and his son. Madame Fortin said in a deep alto a word or two about the privilege of meeting the famous painter who had portrayed her husband and the old mother in a piping voice exclaimed Most sure I was in Sudan in 1870. I saw the Germans I saw the emperor sitting on a bench he was crying my mother's heard everything she's seen everything there's no one in the world like my mother the physician said laying his hand on hers you won't see the Germans again ma bonne mère her daughter-in-law added smiling the captain took coffee with them bore with a little inevitable talk about the war and then eagerly questioned the boy the young man was a chemist a prepatue in the laboratory of the institute past year he was also it appeared even to prehistoric archaeology and had written a thesis on the painted caves of the door-dogan he seemed extremely serious and absorbed in questions of science and letters but it appeared to him perfectly simple to be leaving it all in a few hours to join his regimen. The war had to come this sort of thing couldn't go on he said in the words of Madame Lebel there was the start in an hour and Captain excused himself for intruding on the family who seemed as happily united as harmonious in their deeper interests as if no musical studio parties and exotic dancers had ever exorbed the master of the house Captain, looking at the group left a pang of envy and thought for the thousandth time how frail a screen of activity divided him from depths of loneliness he dared not sound for every man had business and desire he muttered as he followed the physician in the consulting room he explained it's about my son he had not been able to bring the phrase out in the presence of the young man he must have been just George's age and who was leaving in an hour for his regimen between Captain and the father there were complacencies and there might therefore be accommodations in the consulting room one breathed a lower air that was not that Captain wanted to do anything underhand he was genuinely anxious about George's health after all to burgolosis did not disappear in a month or even a year his anxiety was justified and then George, but for the stupid accident of his birth would never have been mixed up in the war Captain felt that he could make his request with his head high Gordon Lecluze seemed to think so too at any rate he expressed no surprise but could anything on earth have surprised him? after 30 years in that confessional of a room the difficulty was that he did not see his way to do anything not immediately at any rate you must let the boy join his base he leaves tomorrow give me the number of his regimen and the name of the town and trust me to do what I can but you're off yourself yes, I'm being sent to a hospital at Leon but I'll leave you my address Captain Lingard unable to take this as final he looked about him uneasily and then for a moment straight into the physician's eyes you must know how I feel your boy is an only son too yes, yes the father sent it in the absent minded tone professional sympathy but Captain felt that he felt the deep difference well, goodbye and thanks as Captain turned to go the physician laid a hand on his shoulder and spoke with sudden fierce emotion yes, Jean is an only son and only child for his mother and myself it's not a trifle having our only son in the war there was no allusion to the dancer no hint that Fortin remembered her it was Compton who lowered his gaze before the look in the other father's eyes end of chapter 6 chapter 7 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 read for LibriVox by Mary Lou Capes Platt A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton chapter 7 A Son in the War A Son in the War the words followed Compton down the stairs what did it mean and what must it feel like for parents in this safe denationalized modern world to be suddenly saying to each other with white lips A Son in the War he stood on the curb stone staring ahead of him and forgetting wither he was bound the world seemed to lie under a spell and its weight was on his limbs and brain usually any deep inward trouble made him more than ever alive to the outward aspect of things but this new world in which people talked glibly of sons in the war had suddenly become invisible to him and he did not know where he was or what he was staring at he noted the fact and remembered a story of St. Bernard he thought it was a beautiful lake in super sensual ecstasy and saying afterward was there a lake I didn't see it on the way back to the hotel he passed the American embassy and had a vague idea of trying to see the ambassador and finding out if the United States were not going to devise some way of evading the tyrannous regulation that bound young Americans to France and they called this a free country he heard himself exclaiming the remark sounded exactly like one of Julius and this reminded him that the ambassador frequently dined at the Brant's they had certainly not left his door untried and since to the Brant's circles Campton was still a shaggy bohemian his appeal was not likely to fortify theirs his mind turned to Jorgenstein and the vast web of the speculators financial relations but after all France was on the verge of war if not in it and following up the threads of the Jorgenstein Web was likely to land one in Frankfurt or Vienna at the hotel he found his sitting room empty but presently the door opened and George came in laden with books fresh yellow and grey ones in flammarian wrappers hello dad he said and added so the silly show went on mobilization is not war said Campton no what on earth are all those books provinder it appears we may rot at the depot for weeks I've just seen a chap who's in my regiment Campton felt a sudden relief the purchase of the books proved that George was fairly sure he would not be sent to the front his father went up to him and tapped him on the chest how about this he wanted to add I've just seen Fortin who says he'll get you off but George's eye was cool and unenthusiastic it did not encourage such confidences oh the lungs I imagine I'm sound again he paused and stooped to turn over the books carelessly he added but then the stethoscope may think differently nothing to do but wait and see Campton agreed it was clear that the boy hated what was ahead of him and what more could his father ask of course he was not going to confess to a desire to shirk his duty but it was easy to see that his whole lucid intelligence repudiated any sympathy with the ruinous adventure have you seen Adele Campton inquired and George replied that he had dropped in for five minutes to see his father is she nervous? old Adele I should say not she's fighting mad, la revanche and all the rest of it she doesn't realize sanctos simplicitas oh I can see Adele throwing on the faggots father and son were silent both busy lighting cigarettes when George's was lit he remarked well if we're not called at once it'll be a good chance to read Campton stared not knowing the book even by name what a queer changeling the boy was but George's composure his deep and genuine indifference to the whole political turmoil once more fortified his father have they any news he ventured they in their private language meant the Brant's oh yes lots Uncle Andy was stiff with it but not really amounting to anything of course there's no doubt they'll be war how about England nobody knows but the bankers seem to think England's alright George paused and finally added look here dear old boy before she leaves I think mother wants to see you Campton hardened instantly she has seen me yesterday I know she told me the son began to cut the pages of one of his books with a visiting card he had picked up and the father stood looking out on the Place de la Concorde through the leafy curtain of the terrace Campton knew that he could not refuse his son's request in his heart of hearts he was glad it had been made since it might mean that they had found a way perhaps through the ambassador but he could never prevent a stiffening of his whole self at any summons or suggestion from the Brant's he thought of the seeming unity of the Fortin-Lucleuse couple and of the background of peaceful family life revealed by the scene about the checkered tablecloth perhaps that was one of the advantages of a social organization which still as a whole ignored divorce and thought any private condemnation better than the open breaking up of a family alright I'll go he agreed where are we dining oh I forgot an awful orgy Dastry wants us at the Union Louis Dastry is dining with him and he let me ask Boylston Boylston? you don't know him a chap who was at Harvard with me he's out here studying painting at the Beaux Arts he's an awfully good sort and he wanted to see me before I go the father's heart sank only one whole day more with his boy and this last evening but one was to be spent with poor embittered Dastry in two youths one unknown to captain who would drown them in stupid war chatter but it was what George wanted and there must not be a shade for George on these last hours alright you promised me something awful for tonight captain grinned sardonically do you mind I'm sorry it's only Dastry's damn chauvinism that I mind why don't you ask Adele to join the chorus well you'll like Boylston said George Dastry after all turned out less tragic and aggressive than captain had feared his irritability had vanished and though he was very grave he seemed preoccupied only with the fate of Europe and not with his personal stake in the affair but the older men said little the youngsters had the floor and captain as he listened to George and young Louis Dastry was overcome by a sense of such dizzy unreality that he had grasped the arms of his ponderous leather armchair to assure himself that he was really in the flesh and in the world what two days ago they were still in the old easy Europe a Europe in which one could make plans engage passages on trains and steamers argue about pictures books theaters ideas draw as much money as one chose out of the bank and say the day after tomorrow I'll be in Berlin or Vienna and here they sat in their same evening clothes about the same shining mahogany writing table apparently the same group of free and independent youths and elderly men and in reality prisoners every one of them handcuffed to this hideous masked bully of war the young men were sure that the conflict was inevitable the evening papers left no doubt of it and there was much animated discussion between young Dastry and George already their views diverged the French youth theoretically at one with his friend as to the senselessness of war in general had at once resolutely disengaged from the mist of doctrine the fatal necessity of this particular war it's the old festering wound of Alsace-Loren Bismarck foresaw it and feared it or perhaps planned it and welcomed it who knows but as long as the wound was there Germany believed that France would try to avenge it and as long as Germany believed that she had to keep up her own war strength and she's kept it up up to the toppling over point ruining herself and us that's the whole thing as I see it war's wrought but to get rid of war forever was one first it was wonderful to Campton that this slender learned youth should already have grasped the necessity of the conflict and its deep causes while his own head was still spinning with wrath and bewilderment at the bottomless perversity of mankind Louis Dastry had analyzed and accepted the situation and his own part in it and he was not simply resigned he was trembling with eagerness to get the thing over if only England is with us we're safe it's a matter of weeks he declared wait a bit, wait a bit I want to know more about a whole lot of things before I fix a date for the fall of Berlin his uncle interposed but Louis flung him a radiant look we've been there before my uncle but there's Russia too said Boylston explosively he had not spoken before nous l'avons eu Votre rein allemande quoted George as he poured a golden hawk into his glass he was keenly interested that was evident but interested as a lookeron a dilettante he had neither valmy nor sedan in his blood and it was as a sympathizing spectator that he ought by rights to have been sharing his friends enthusiasm not as a combatant compelled to obey the same summons Campton glancing from one to another of their brilliant faces felt his determination harden to save George from the consequences of his parents stupid blunder after dinner young destre proposed a music hall the audience would be a curious sight there would be wild enthusiasm and singing of the masseuse the other young men agreed but their elders after a tacitly exchanged glance decided to remain at the club on the plea that someone at the ministry of war had promised to telephone if there were fresh news Campton and destre left alone stood on the balcony watching the boulevards the streets so deserted during the day had become suddenly and densely populated hardly any vehicles were in sight the motor omnibuses were already carrying troops to the stations there was a report abroad that private motors were to be requisitioned and only a few taxis and horse cabs packed to the driver's box with young men in spic and span uniforms broke through the masse of pedestrians which filled the whole width of the boulevards this masse moved slowly and vaguely swaying this way and that as though it awaited a poor tent from the heavens in the glare of electric lamps and glittering theatre fronts the innumerable faces stood out vividly grave intent slightly bewildered except when soldiers passed no cries or songs came from the crowd but only the deep inarticulate rumor which any vast body of people gives forth queer how silent they are how do you think they're taking it but Dastry had grown belligerent again he saw the throngs before him bounding toward the frontier like the unchained furies of rude masse whereas to they seemed full of the dumb wrath of an orderly and laborious people upon whom an unrighteous quarrel had been forced he knew that the thought of Alsace still stirred in French hearts but all Dastry's eloquence could not convince him that these people wanted war or would have sought it had it not been thrust on them the whole monstrous injustice seemed to take shape before him and to brood like a huge sky-filling dragon of the northern darknesses over his light-loving, pleasure-loving labor-loving France George came home late it was two in the morning of his last day with his boy when Campton heard the door open and saw a flash of turned on light all night he had lain staring into the darkness and thinking, thinking of George's future, George's friends, George and women of that unknown side of his boy's life which in this great upheaval of things had suddenly lifted its face to the surface and came if George were not discharged if George were sent to the front if George were killed how strange to think that things the father did not know of might turn out to have been the central things of his son's life the young man came in and Campton looked at him as though he were a stranger hello dad any news from the ministry George tossing aside his hat he had a crumpled rose in his buttonhole and looked gay and fresh with the indestructible freshness of youth what do I really know of him the father asked himself yes, Dastry had had news Germany had already committed acts of overt hostility on the frontier telegraph and telephone communications had been cut French local motives seized troops masked along the border on the specious pretext of the Krieges Gefassestand it was war oh well, George shrugged he lit a cigarette and asked what did you think of Boylston Boylston? the fat brown chap at dinner yes, yes, of course Campton became aware that he had not thought of Boylston at all had hardly been aware of his presence but the painter's registering faculty was always latently at work and in an instant he looked up a round face shyly jovial with short-sighted brown eyes as sharp as needles and dark hair curling tightly over a wide watchful forehead why, I liked him I'm glad because it was a tremendous event for him seeing you he paints and he's been keen on your things for years I wish I'd known, why didn't he say so? he didn't say anything, did he? no, he doesn't much when he's pleased it's the very best chap I know George concluded End of Chapter 7