Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  “Do you mind?” he queried; and hardly hearing her faltered-out: “Mind? When it was what I came for!” he dragged forth an easel, flung on it the first canvas he could lay hands on (though he knew it was the wrong shape and size), and found himself instantly transported into the lost world which was the only real one.

  

  XX.

  For a month Campton painted on in transcendent bliss. His first stroke carried him out of space and time, into a region where all that had become numbed and atrophied in him could expand and breathe. Lines, images, colours were again the sole facts: he plunged into their whirling circles like a stranded sea-creature into the sea. Once more every face was not a vague hieroglyph, a curtain drawn before an invisible aggregate of wants and woes, but a work of art, a flower in a pattern, to be dealt with on its own merits, like a bronze or a jewel. During the first day or two his hand halted; but the sense of insufficiency was a goad, and he fought with his subject till he felt a strange ease in every renovated muscle, and his model became like a musical instrument on which he played with careless mastery.

  He had transferred his easel to Mrs. Talkett’s apartment. It was an odd patchwork place, full of bold beginnings and doubtful pauses, rash surrenders to the newest fashions and abrupt insurrections against them, where Louis-Philippe mahogany had entrenched itself against the aggression of art nouveau hangings, and the frail grace of eighteenth-century armchairs shed derision on lumpy modern furniture painted like hobby-horses at a fair. It amused Campton to do Mrs. Talkett against such a background: her thin personality needed to be filled out by the visible results of its many quests and cravings. There were people one could sit down before a blank wall, and all their world was there, in the curves of their faces and the way their hands lay in their laps; others, like Mrs. Talkett, seemed to be made out of the reflection of what surrounded them, as if they had been born of a tricky grouping of looking-glasses, and would vanish if it were changed.

  At first Campton was steeped in the mere sensual joy of his art; but after a few days the play of the mirrors began to interest him. Mrs. Talkett had abandoned her hospital work, and was trying, as she said, to “recreate herself.” In this she was aided by a number of people who struck Campton as rather too young not to have found some other job, or too old to care any longer for that particular one. But all this did not trouble his newly recovered serenity. He seemed to himself, somehow, like a drowned body—but drowned in a toy aquarium—still staring about with living eyes, but aware of the other people only as shapes swimming by with a flash of exotic fins. They were enclosed together, all of them, in an unreal luminous sphere, mercifully screened against the reality from which a common impulse of horror had driven them; and since he was among them it was not his business to wonder at the others. So, through the cloud of his art, he looked out on them impartially.

  The high priestess of the group was Mme. de Dolmetsch, with Harvey Mayhew as her acolyte. Mr. Mayhew was still in pursuit of Atrocities: he was in fact almost the only member of the group who did not rather ostentatiously disavow the obligation to “carry on.” But he had discovered that to discharge this sacred task he must vary it by frequent intervals of relaxation. He explained to Campton that he had found it to be “his duty to rest”; and he was indefatigable in the performance of duty. He had therefore, with an expenditure of eloquence which Campton thought surprisingly slight, persuaded Boylston to become his understudy, and devote several hours a day to the whirling activities of the shrimp-pink Bureau of Atrocities at the Nouveau Luxe. Campton, at first, could not understand how the astute Boylston had allowed himself to be drawn into the eddy; but it turned out that Boylston’s astuteness had drawn him in. “You see, there’s an awful lot of money to be got out of it, one way and another, and I know a use for every penny—that it, Miss Anthony and I do,” the young man modestly explained; adding, in response to the painter’s puzzled stare, that Mr. Mayhew’s harrowing appeals were beginning to bring from America immense sums for the Victims, and that Mr. Mayhew, while immensely gratified by the effect of his eloquence, and the prestige it was bringing him in French social and governmental circles, had not the cloudiest notion how the funds should be used, and had begged Boylston to advise him. It was owing to this that the ex-Delegate to the Hague was able, with a light conscience, to seek the repose of Mrs. Talkett’s company and, with a smile of the widest initiation, to listen to the subversive conversation of her familiars.

  “Subversive” was the motto of the group. Every one was engaged in attacking some theory of art or life or letters which nobody in particular defended. Even Mr. Talkett—a kindly young man with eyeglasses and glossy hair, who roamed about straightening the furniture, like a gentlemanly detective watching the presents at a wedding—owned to Campton that he was subversive; and on the painter’s pressing for a definition, added: “Why, I don’t believe in anything she doesn’t believe in,” while his eye-glasses shyly followed his wife’s course among the teacups.

  Mme. de Dolmetsch, though obviously anxious to retain her hold on Mr. Mayhew, did not restrict herself to such mild fare, but exercised her matchless eyes on a troop of followers: the shock-haired pianist who accompanied her recitations, a straight-backed young American diplomatist whose collars seemed a part of his career, a lustrous South American millionaire, and a short squat Sicilian who designed the costumes for the pianist’s unproduced ballets.

  All these people appeared to believe intensely in each other’s reality and importance; but it gradually came over Campton that all of them, excepting their host and hostess, knew that they were merely masquerading.

  To Campton, used to the hard-working world of art, this playing at Bohemia seemed a nursery-game; but the scene acquired an unexpected solidity from the appearance in it, one day, of the banker Jorgenstein, who strolled in as naturally as if he had been dropping into Campton’s studio to enquire into the progress of his own portrait.

  “I must come and look you up, Campton—get you to finish me,” he said jovially, tapping his fat boot with a malacca stick as he looked over the painter’s head at the canvas on which Mrs. Talkett’s restless image seemed to flutter like a butterfly impaled.

  “You’ll owe it to me if he does you,” the sitter declared, smiling back at the leer which Campton divined behind his shoulder; and he felt a sudden pity for her innocence.

  “My wife made Campton come back to his real work—doing his bit, you know,” said Mr. Talkett, straightening a curtain and disappearing again, like a diving animal; and Mrs. Talkett turned her plaintive eyes on Campton. “That kind of idiocy is all I’ve ever had,” they seemed to say; and he nearly cried back to her: “But, you poor child, it’s the only honest thing anywhere near you!”

  Absorbed in his picture, he hardly stopped to wonder at Jorgenstein’s reappearance, at his air of bloated satisfaction or his easy allusions to Cabinet Ministers and eminent statesmen. The atmosphere of the Talkett house was so mirage-like that even the big red bulk of the international financier became imponderable in it.

  But one day Campton, on his way home, ran across Dastrey, and remembered that they had not met for weeks. The ministerial drudge looked worn and preoccupied, and Campton was abruptly recalled to the world he had been trying to escape from.

  “You seem rather knocked-up—what’s wrong with you?”

  Dastrey stared. “Wrong with me? Well—did you like the communique this morning?”

  “I didn’t read it,” said Campton curtly. They walked along a few steps in silence.

  “You see,” the painter continued, “I’ve gone back to my job—my painting. I suddenly found I had to.”

  Dastrey glanced at him with surprising kindness. “Ah, that’s good news, my dear fellow!”

  “You think so?” Campton half-sneered.

  “Of course—why not? What are you painting? May I come and see?”

  “Naturally.” Campton paused. “The fact is, I was bitten the other day with a desire to depict that
little will-o’-the-wisp of a Mrs. Talkett. Come to her house any afternoon and I’ll show you the thing.”

  “To her house?” Dastrey paused with a frown. “Then the picture’s finished?”

  “No—not by a long way. I’m doing it there—in her milieu, among her crowd. It amuses me; they amuse me. When will you come?” He shot out the sentences like challenges; and his friend took them up in the same tone.

  “To Mrs. Talkett’s—to meet her crowd? Thanks—I’m too much tied down by my job.”

  “No; you’re not. You’re too disapproving,” said Campton quarrelsomely. “You think we’re all a lot of shirks, of drones, of international loafers—I don’t know what you call us. But I’m one of them, so whatever name you give them I must answer to. Well, I’ll tell you what they are, my dear fellow—and I’m not ashamed to be among them: they’re people who’ve resolutely, unanimously, unshakeably decided, for a certain number of hours each day, to forget the war, to ignore it, to live as if it were not and never had been, so that”

  “So that?”

  “So that beauty shall not perish from the earth!” Campton shouted, bringing his stick down with a whack on the pavement.

  Dastrey broke into a laugh. “Allons done! Decided to forget the war? Why, bless your heart, they’ve never, not one of ’em, ever been able to remember it for an hour together; no, not from the first day, except as it interfered with their plans or cut down their amusements or increased their fortunes. You’re the only one of them, my dear chap, (since you class yourself among them) of whom what you’ve just said is true; and if you can forget the war while you’re at your work, so much the better for you and for us and for posterity; and I hope you’ll paint all Mrs. Talkett’s crowd, one after another. Though I doubt if they’re as good subjects now as when you caught them last July with the war-funk on.” He held out his hand with a dry smile. “Good-bye. I’m off to meet my nephew, who’s here on leave.”

  He hastened away, leaving Campton in a crumbled world. Louis Dastrey on leave? But that was because he was at the front, the real front, in the trenches, had already had a slight wound and a fine citation. Staff-officers, as George had wisely felt, were not asking for leave just yet…

  The thoughts excited by this encounter left Campton more than ever resolved to drug himself with work and frivolity. It was none of his business to pry into the consciences of the people about him, not even into Jorgenstein’s—into which one would presumably have had to be let down in a diver’s suit, with oxygen pumping at top pressure. If the government tolerated Jorgenstein’s presence in France, probably on the ground that he could be useful—so the banker himself let it be known—it was silly of people like Adele Anthony and Dastrey to wince at the mere mention of his name. There woke in Campton all the old spirit of aimless random defiance—revolt for revolt’s sake—which had marked the first period of his life after his separation from his wife. He had long since come to regard it as a crude and juvenile phase—yet here he was reliving it.

  Though he knew of the intimacy between Mrs. Talkett and the Brants he had no fear of meeting Julia: it was impossible to picture her neat head battling with the blasts of that dishevelled drawing-room. But though she did not appear there, he heard her more and more often alluded to, in terms of startling familiarity, by Mrs. Talkett’s visitors. It was clear that they all saw her, chiefly in her own house, that they thought her, according to their respective vocabularies, “a perfect dear,” “une femme exquise” or “une bonne vieille” (ah, poor Julia!); and that their sudden enthusiasm for her was not uninspired by the fact that she had got her marvellous chef demobilised, and was giving little “war-dinners” followed by a quiet turn at bridge.

  Campton remembered Mme. de Tranlay’s rebuke to Mrs. Brant on the day when he had last called in the Avenue Marigny; then he remembered also that it was on that very day that he had returned to his painting.

  “After all, she held out longer than I did—poor Julia!” he mused, annoyed at the idea of her being the complacent victim of all the voracities he saw about him, and yet reflecting that she was at last living her life, as they called it at Mrs. Talkett’s. After all, the fact that George was not at the front seemed to exonerate his parents—unless, indeed, it did just the opposite.

  One day, coming earlier than usual to Mrs. Talkett’s to put in a last afternoon’s work on her portrait, Campton, to his surprise, found his wife in front of it. Equally to his surprise he noticed that she was dressed with a juvenility quite new to her; and for the first time he thought she looked old-fashioned and also old. She met him with her usual embarrassment.

  “I didn’t know you came as early as this. Madge told me I might just run in” She waved her hand toward the portrait.

  “I hope you like it,” he said, suddenly finding that he didn’t.

  “It’s marvellous—marvellous.” She looked at him timidly. “It’s extraordinary, how you’ve caught her rhythm, her tempo,” she ventured in the jargon of the place. Campton, to hide a smile, turned away to get his brushes. “I’m so glad,” she continued hastily, “that you’ve begun to paint again. We all need to … to …”

  “Oh, not you and I, do we?” he rejoined with a scornful laugh.

  She evidently caught the allusion, for she blushed all over her uncovered neck, up through the faintly wrinkled cheeks to the roots of her newly dyed hair; then he saw her eyes fill.

  “What’s she crying for? Because George is not in danger?” he wondered, busying himself with his palette.

  Mrs. Talkett hurried in with surprise and apologies; and one by one the habitues followed, with cheery greetings for Mrs. Brant and a moment of constraint as they noted Campton’s presence, and the relation between the two was mutely passed about. Then the bridge-tables were brought, Mr. Talkett began to straighten the cards nervously, and the guests broke up into groups, forgetting everything but their own affairs. As Campton turned back to his work he was aware of a last surprise in the sight of Mrs. Brant serene and almost sparkling, waving her adieux to the bridge-tables, and going out followed by Jorgenstein, with whom she seemed on terms of playful friendliness. Of all strange war promiscuities, Campton thought this the strangest.

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  XXI.

  The next time Campton saw Mrs. Brant was in his own studio.

  He was preparing, one morning, to leave the melancholy place, when the bell rang and his bonne let her in. Her dress was less frivolous than at Mrs. Talkett’s, and she wore a densely patterned veil, like the ladies in cinema plays when they visit their seducers or their accomplices.

  Through the veil she looked at him agitatedly, and said: “George is not at Sainte-Menehould.”

  He stared.

  “No. Anderson was there the day before yesterday.”

  “Brant? At Sainte-Menehould?” Campton felt the blood rush to his temples. What! He, the boy’s father, had not so much as dared to ask for the almost unattainable permission to go into the war-zone; and this other man, who was nothing to George, absolutely nothing, who had no right whatever to ask for leave to visit him, had somehow obtained the priceless favour, and instead of passing it on, instead of offering at least to share it with the boy’s father, had sneaked off secretly to feast on the other’s lawful privilege!

  “How the devil?” Campton burst out.

  “Oh, he got a Red Cross mission; it was arranged very suddenly—through a friend…”

  “Yes—well?” Campton stammered, sitting down lest his legs should fail him, and signing to her to take a chair.

  “Well—he was not there!” she repeated excitedly. “It’s what we might have known—since he’s changed his address.”

  “Then he didn’t see him?” Campton interrupted, the ferocious joy of the discovery crowding out his wrath and wonder.

  “Anderson didn’t? No. He wasn’t there, I tell you!”

  “The H.Q. has been moved?”

  “No, it hasn’t. Anderson saw one of the officers. He said George had b
een sent on a mission.”

  “To another H.Q.?”

  “That’s what they said. I don’t believe it.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “I don’t know. Anderson’s sure they told him the truth. The officer he saw is a friend of George’s, and he said George was expected back that very evening.”

  Campton sat looking at her uncertainly. Did she dread, or did she rather wish, to disbelieve the officer’s statement? Where did she hope or fear that George had gone? And what were Campton’s own emotions? As confused, no doubt, as hers—as undefinable. The insecurity of his feelings moved him to a momentary compassion for hers, which were surely pitiable, whatever else they were. Then a savage impulse swept away every other, and he said: “Wherever George was, Brant’s visit will have done him no good.”

  She grew pale. “What do you mean?”

  “I wonder it never occurred to you—or to your husband, since he’s so solicitous,” Campton went on, prolonging her distress.

  “Please tell me what you mean,” she pleaded with frightened eyes.

  “Why, in God’s name, couldn’t you both let well enough alone? Didn’t you guess why George never asked for leave—why I’ve always advised him not to? Don’t you know that nothing is as likely to get a young fellow into trouble as having his family force their way through to see him, use influence, seem to ask favours? I dare say that’s how that fool of a Dolmetsch woman got Isador killed. No one would have noticed where he was if she hadn’t gone on so about him. They had to send him to the front finally. And now the chances are—”

  “Oh, no, no, no—don’t say it!” She held her hands before her face as if he had flung something flaming at her. “It was I who made Anderson go!”

  “Well—Brant ought to have thought of that—I did,” he pursued sardonically.

  Her answer disarmed him. “You’re his father.”