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

the last young figures clinging to the rear of the last
carriage had vanished, and the bare rails again glittered up from the cindery
tracks, Campton turned and looked about him.
                 All
the platforms of the station were crowded as he had seldom seen any place
crowded, and to his surprise he found himself taking in every detail of the
scene with a morbid accuracy of observation. He had discovered, during these
last days, that his artist’s vision had been strangely
unsettled. Sometimes, as when he had left Fortin’s house, he saw nothing: the
material world, which had always tugged at him with a thousand hands, vanished
and left him in the void. Then again, as at present, he saw everything, saw it
too clearly, in all its superfluous and negligible reality, instead of
instinctively selecting, and disregarding what was not to his purpose.
                 Faces,
faces—they swarmed about him, and his overwrought
vision registered them one by one. Especially he noticed the faces of the
women, women of all ages, all classes. These were the wives, mothers,
grandmothers, sisters, mistresses of all those heavily laden trainfuls of
French youth. He was struck with the same strong cheerfulness in all: some
pale, some flushed, some serious, but all firmly and calmly smiling.
                 One
young woman in particular his look dwelt on—a dark girl in a becoming
dress—both because she was so pleasant to see, and because there was such
assurance in her serenity that she did not have to constrain her lips and eyes,
but could trust them to be what she wished. Yet he saw by the way she clung to
the young artilleryman from whom she was parting that
hers were no sisterly farewells.
                 An
immense hum of voices filled the vast glazed enclosure. Campton caught the
phrases flung up to the young faces piled one above another in the
windows—words of motherly admonishment, little jokes, tender names, mirthful
allusions, last callings out: “Write often! Don’t forget to wrap up your
throat… Remember to send a line to Annette… Bring home a Prussian helmet for
the children! On les aura, pas, mon vieux?” It was all
bright, brave and confident. “If Berlin could only see it!” Campton thought.
                 He
tried to remember what his own last words to George had been, but could not;
yet his throat felt dry and thirsty, as if he had talked a great deal. The
train vanished in a roar, and he leaned against a pier to let the crowd flood
by, not daring to risk his lameness in such a turmoil .
                 Suddenly
he heard loud sobs behind him. He turned, and recognized the hat and hair of
the girl whose eyes had struck him. He could not see them now, for they were
buried in her hands and her whole body shook with woe. An elderly man was
trying to draw her away—her father, probably.
                 “Come,
come, my child”
                 “Oh—oh—oh,”
she hiccoughed, following blindly.
                 The
people nearest stared at her, and the faces of other women grew pale. Campton
saw tears on the cheeks of an old body in a black bonnet who might have been
his own Mme. Lebel. A pale lad went away weeping.
                 But
they were all afraid, then, all in immediate deadly fear for the lives of their
beloved! The same fear grasped Campton’s heart, a very present terror, such as he
had hardly before imagined. Compared to it, all that he had felt hitherto
seemed as faint as the sensations of a looker-on. His knees failed him, and he
grasped a transverse bar of the pier.
                 People
were leaving the station in groups of two or three who seemed to belong to each
other; only he was alone. George’s mother had not come to bid her son goodbye;
she had declared that she would rather take leave of him quietly in her own
house than in a crowd of dirty people at the station. But then it was