Now and then Campton, sitting beside him, seemed to see a little way into those darknesses; but after a moment he always shuddered back to daylight, benumbed, inadequate, weighed down with the weakness of the flesh and the incapacity to reach beyond his habitual limit of sensation. “No wonder they don’t talk to us,” he mused.
By-and-bye, perhaps, when George was well again, and the war over, the father might penetrate into his son’s mind, and find some new ground of communion with him: now the thing was not to be conceived.
He recalled again Adele Anthony’s asking him, when he had come back from Doullens: “What was the first thing you felt?” and his answering: “Nothing.”... Well, it was like that now: every vibration had ceased in him. Between himself and George lay the unbridgeable abyss of his son’s experiences.
As he sat there, the door was softly opened a few inches and Boylston’s face showed through the crack: light shot from it like the rays around a chalice. At a sign from him Campton slipped out into the corridor and Boylston silently pushed a newspaper into his grasp. He bent over it, trying with dazzled eyes to read sense into the staring head-lines: but “America—America—America——” was all that he could see.
A nurse came gliding up on light feet: the tears were running down her face. “Yes—I know, I know, I know!” she exulted. Up the tall stairs and through the ramifying of long white passages rose an unwonted rumour of sound, checked, subdued, invisibly rebuked, but ever again breaking out, like the noise of ripples on a windless beach. In every direction nurses and orderlies were speeding from one room to another of the house of pain with the message: “America has declared war on Germany.”
Campton and Boylston stole back into George’s room. George lifted his eyelids and smiled at them, understanding before they spoke.
“The sixth of April! Remember the date!” Boylston cried over him in a gleeful whisper.
The wounded man, held fast in his splints, contrived to raise his head a little. His eyes laughed back into Boylston’s. “You’ll be in uniform within a week!” he said; and Boylston crimsoned.
Campton turned away again to the window. The day had come—had come; and his son had lived to see it. So many of George’s comrades had gone down to death without hope; and in a few months more George, leaning from that same window—or perhaps well enough to be watching the spectacle with his father from the terrace of the Tuileries—would look out on the first brown battalions marching across the Place de la Concorde, where father and son, in the early days of the war, had seen the young recruits of the Foreign Legion patrolling under improvised flags.