A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton

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 Mlle. 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 too simplifying to penetrate far into his doubts, and after nearly a year's incessant contact with the most savage realities her mind still seemed at ease in its old formulas.

Simplicity, after all, was the best safeguard in such hours. Mrs. Brant was as absorbed in her task as Adele Anthony. Since the Brant villa at Deauville had been turned into a hospital she was always on the road, in a refulgent new motor emblazoned with a Red Cross, carrying supplies, rushing down with great surgeons, hurrying back to committee meetings and conferences with the Service de Santé (for she and Mr. Brant were now among the leaders in American relief work in Paris), and throwing open the Avenue Marigny drawing-rooms for concerts, lectures and such sober philanthropic gaieties as society was beginning to countenance.

On the day when Mme. Lebel told Campton that the horse-chestnuts were in blossom and he must buy some new shirts he was particularly in need of such incentives. He had made up his mind to go to see Mrs. Brant about a concert for "The Friends of French Art" which was to be held in her house. Ever since George had asked him to see something of his mother Campton had used the pretext of charitable collaboration as the best way of getting over their fundamental lack of anything to say to each other.

The appearance of the Champs Elysées confirmed Mme. Lebel's announcement. Everywhere the punctual rosy spikes were rising above unfolding green; and Campton, looking up at them, remembered once thinking how Nature had adapted herself to the scene in overhanging with her own pink lamps and green fans the lamps and fans of the _cafés chantants_ beneath. The latter lights had long since been extinguished, the fans folded up; and as he passed the bent and broken arches of electric light, the iron chairs and dead plants in paintless boxes, all heaped up like the scenery of a bankrupt theatre, he felt the pang of Nature's obstinate renewal in a world of death. Yet he also felt the stir of the blossoming trees in the form of a more restless discontent, a duller despair, a new sense of inadequacy. How could war go on when spring had come?

Mrs. Brant, having reduced her household and given over her drawing-rooms to charity, received in her boudoir, a small room contrived by a clever upholsterer to simulate a seclusion of which she had never felt the need. Photographs strewed the low tables; and facing the door Campton saw George's last portrait, in uniform, enclosed in an expensive frame. Campton had received the same photograph, and thrust it into a drawer; he thought a young man on a safe staff job rather ridiculous in uniform, and at the same time the sight filled him with a secret dread.

Mrs. Brant was bidding goodbye to a lady in mourning whom Campton did not know. His approach through the carpeted antechamber had been unnoticed, and as he entered the room he heard Mrs. Brant say in French, apparently in reply to a remark of her visitor: "Bridge, _chère Madame_? No; not yet. I confess I haven't the courage to take up my old life. We mothers with sons at the front."