Edith Wharton - Novel 14 by A Son at the Front (v2.1)

Author:A Son at the Front (v2.1) [Front, A Son at the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XIX.

One day Mme. Lebel said: “The first horse-chestnuts are in bloom. And monsieur must really buy himself some new shirts.”

Campton looked at her in surprise. She spoke in a different voice; he wondered if she had had good news of her grandchildren. Then he saw that the furrows in her old face were as deep as ever, and that the change in her voice was simply an unconscious response to the general stirring of sap, the spring need to go on living, through everything and in spite of everything.

On se fait une raison, as Mme. Lebel would have said. Life had to go on, and new shirts had to be bought. No one knew why it was necessary, but every one felt that it was; and here were the horse-chestnuts once more actively confirming it. Habit laid its compelling grasp on the wires of the poor broken marionettes with which the Furies had been playing, and they responded, though with feebler flappings, to the accustomed jerk.

In Campton the stirring of the sap had been a cold and languid process, chiefly felt in his reluctance to go on with his relief work. He had tried to close his ears to the whispers of his own lassitude, vexed, after the first impulse of self-dedication, to find that no vocation declared itself, that his task became each day more tedious as well as more painful. Theoretically, the pain ought to have stimulated him: perpetual immersion in that sea of anguish should have quickened his effort to help the poor creatures sinking under its waves. The woe of the war had had that effect on Adele Anthony, on young Boylston, on Mile. Davril, on the greater number of his friends. But their ardour left him cold. He wanted to help, he wanted it, he was sure, as earnestly as they; but the longing was not an inspiration to him, and he felt more and more that to work listlessly was to work ineffectually.

“I give the poor devils so many boots and money-orders a day; you give them yourself, and so does Boylston,” he complained to Miss Anthony; who murmured: Ah, Boylston” as if that point of the remark were alone worth noticing.

“At his age too; it’s extraordinary, the way the boy’s got out of himself.”

“Or into himself, rather. He was a pottering boy before—now he’s a man, with a man’s sense of things.”

“Yes; but his patience, his way of getting into their minds, their prejudices, their meannesses, their miseries! He doesn’t seem to me like the kind who was meant to be a missionary.”

“Not a bit of it… But he’s burnt up with shame at our not being in the war—as all the young Americans are.”

Campton made an impatient movement. “Benny Upsher again!

Can’t we let our government decide all that for us? What else did we elect it for, I wonder?”

“I wonder,” echoed Miss Anthony.

Talks of this kind were irritating and unprofitable, and Campton did not again raise the question. Miss Anthony’s vision was

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