Read Online Edith Wharton - Novel 14 by A Son at the Front (v2.1) - Free Book Online Page B

to
prehistoric archaeology, and had written a “thesis” on the painted caves of the Dordogne . 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 regiment. “The war had to come.
This sort of thing couldn’t go on,” he said, in the words of Mme. Lebel.
                 He
was to start in an hour, and Campton 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 absorbed the master
of the house.
                 Campton,
looking at the group, felt 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 hath 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 who
must have been just George’s age, and who was leaving in an hour for his
regiment. But between Campton and the father there were complicities, and there
might therefore be accommodations. In the consulting-room one breathed a lower
air.
                 It
was not that Campton wanted to do anything underhand. He was genuinely anxious
about George’s health. After all, tuberculosis 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. Campton felt that he could make his request with his head high.
                 Fortin-Lescluze
seemed to think so too; at any rate he expressed no surprise. But could
anything on earth have surprised him, after thirty years in the confessional of
a room?
                 The
difficulty was that he did not see his way to doing anything—not immediately,
at any rate.
                 “You
must let the boy join his base. He leaves tomorrow? Give me the number of his
regiment 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 Lyons . But I’ll leave you my address.”
                 Campton
lingered, 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 assented, in the absent-minded tone of professional sympathy.
But Campton felt that he felt the deep difference.
                 “Well,
goodbye—and thanks.”
                 As
Campton turned to go the physician laid a hand on his shoulder and spoke with
sudden fierce emotion. “Yes: Jean is an only son—an 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
Campton who lowered his gaze before the look in the other father’s eyes.
                   
     
  VII.
 
 
                 “A
son in the war”
                 The
words followed Campton 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 kerbstone, staring ahead of him and forgetting whither 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