Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  He had been half afraid of offending her: but she appeared to consider the question impartially, and without a shadow of resentment. “Sometimes I think more—because in the beginning it wasn’t meant to last. And now—if he wants to marry me? Oh, I wish I knew what to do!”

  Campton continued to ponder. “There’s one more question, since we’re talking frankly: what does Talkett know of all this?”

  She looked frightened. “Oh, nothing, nothing!”

  “And you’ve no idea how he would take it?”

  She examined the question with tortured eye-brows, and at length, to Campton’s astonishment, brought out: “Magnificently”

  “He’d be generous, you mean? But it would go hard with him?”

  “Oh, dreadfully, dreadfully!” She seemed to need the assurance to restore her shaken self-approval.

  Campton rose with a movement of pity and laid his hand on her shoulder. “My dear child, if your husband cares for you, give up my son.”

  Her face fell, and she drew back. “Oh, but you don’t understand—not in the least! It’s not possible—it’s not moral. You know I’m all for the new morality. First of all, we must be true to self.” She paused, and then broke out: ‘You tell me to give him up because you think he’s tired of me. But he’s not—I know he’s not! It’s his ideas that you don’t understand, any more than I do. It’s the war that has changed him. He says he wants only things that last—that are permanent—things that hold a man fast. That sometimes he feels as if he were being swept away on a flood, and were trying to catch at things—at anything—as he’s rushed along under the waves… He says he wants quiet, monotony … to be sure the same things will happen every day. When we go out together he sometimes stands for a quarter of an hour and stares at the same building, or at the Seine under the bridges. But he’s happy, I’m sure… I’ve never seen him happier .. . only it’s in a way I can’t make out…”

  “Ah, my dear, if it comes to that—I’m not sure that I can. Not sure enough to help you, I’m afraid.”

  She looked at him, disappointed. ‘You won’t speak to him then?”

  “Not unless he speaks to me.”

  “Ah, he frightens you—just as he does me!”

  She pulled her hat down on her troubled brow, gathered up her furs, and took another sidelong peep at the glass. Then she turned toward the door. On the threshold she paused and looked back at Campton. “Don’t you see,” she cried, “that if I were to give George up he’d get himself sent straight back to the front?”

  Campton’s heart gave an angry leap; for a second he felt the impulse to strike her, to catch her by the shoulders and bundle her out of the room. With a great effort he controlled himself and opened the door.

  “You don’t understand—you don’t understand!” she called back to him once again from the landing.

  Madge Talkett had asked him to speak to his son: he had refused, and she had retaliated by planting that poisoned shaft in him. But what had retaliation to do with it? She had probably spoken the simple truth, and with the natural desire to enlighten him. If George wanted to marry her, it must be (since human nature, though it might change its vocabulary, kept its instincts), it must be that he was very much in love—and in that case her refusal would in truth go hard with him, and it would be natural that he should try to get himself sent away from Paris… From Paris, yes; but not necessarily to the front. After such wounds and such honours he had only to choose; a staff-appointment could easily be got. Or, no doubt, with his two languages, he might, if he preferred, have himself sent on a military mission to America. With all this propaganda talk, wasn’t he the very type of officer they wanted for the neutral countries?

  It was Campton’s dearest wish that George should stay where he was; he knew his peace of mind would vanish the moment his son was out of sight. But he suspected that George would soon weary of staff-work, or of any form of soldiering at the rear, and try for the trenches if he left Paris; whereas, in Paris, Madge Talkett might hold him—as she had meant his father to see.

  The first thing then, was to make sure of a job at the War Office.

  Campton turned and tossed like a sick man on the hard bed of his problem. To plan, to scheme, to plot and circumvent—nothing was more hateful to him, there was nothing in which he was less skilled. If only he dared to consult Adele Anthony! But Adele was still incorrigibly warlike, and her having been in George’s secret while his parents were excluded from it left no doubt as to the side on which her influence would bear. She loved the boy, Campton sometimes thought, even more passionately than his mother did; but—how did the old song go?—she loved honour, or her queer conception of it, more. Ponder as he would, he could not picture her, even now, lifting a finger to keep George back.

  Campton struggled all the morning with these questions. After lunch he pocketed Mrs. Talkett’s money-bag and carried it to the Palais Royal, where he discovered Harvey Mayhew in confabulation with Mme. Beausite, who still trailed her ineffectual beauty about the office. The painter thought he detected a faint embarrassment in the glance with which they both greeted him.

  “Hallo, Campton! Looking for our good friend Boylston? He’s off duty this afternoon, Mme. Beausite tells me; as he is pretty often in these days, I’ve noticed,” Mr. Mayhew sardonically added. “In fact, the office has rather been left to run itself lately—eh? Of course our good Miss Anthony is absorbed with her refugees—gives us but a divided allegiance. And Boylston—well, young men, young men! Of course it’s been a weary pull for him. By the way, my dear fellow,” Mr. Mayhew continued, as Campton appeared about to turn away, “I called at Mrs. Talkett’s just now to ask for the money from the concert—a good round sum, I hear it is—and she told me she’d given it to you. Have you brought it with you? If so, Mme. Beausite here would take charge of it”

  Mme. Beausite turned her great resigned eyes on the painter. “Mr. Campton knows I’m very careful. I will lock it up till his friend’s return. Now that Mr. Boylston is so much away I very often have such responsibilities.”

  Campton’s eyes returned her glance; but he did not waver. “Thanks so much; but as the sum is rather large it seems to me the bank’s the proper place. Will you please tell Boylston I’ve deposited it?”

  Mr. Mayhew’s benevolent pink turned to an angry red. For a moment Campton thought he was about to say something foolish. But he merely bent his head stiffly, muttered a vague phrase about “irregular proceedings,” and returned to his seat by Mme. Beausite’s desk.

  As for Campton, his words had decided his course: he would take the money at once to Bullard and Brant’s and seize the occasion to see the banker. Mr. Brant was the only person with whom, at this particular juncture, he cared to talk of George.

  

  XXXI.

  Mr. Brant’s private office was as glitteringly neat as when Campton had entered it for the first time, and seen the fatal telegram about Benny Upsher marring the order of the desk.

  Now he crossed the threshold with different feelings. To have Mr. Brant look up and smile, to shake hands with him, accept one of his cigars, and sink into one of the blue leather arm-chairs, seemed to be in the natural order of things. He felt only the relief of finding himself with the one person likely to understand.

  “About George” he began.

  “Yes?” said Mr. Brant briskly. “It’s curious—I was just thinking of looking you up. It’s his birthday next Tuesday, you know.”

  “Oh” said the father, slightly put off. He had not come to talk of birthdays; nor did he need to be reminded of his son’s by Mr. Brant. He concluded that Mr. Brant would be less easy to get on with in Paris than at the front.

  “And we thought of celebrating the day by a little party—a dinner, with perhaps the smallest kind of a dance: or just bridge—yes, probably just bridge,” the banker added tentatively. “Opinions differ as to the suitability—it’s for his mother to decide. But of course no evening clothes, and we hoped perhaps to persu
ade you. Our only object is to amuse him—to divert his mind from this wretched entanglement.”

  It was doubtful if Mr. Brant had ever before made so long a speech, except perhaps at a board meeting; and then only when he read the annual report. He turned pink and stared over Campton’s shoulder at the panelled white wall, on which a false Reynolds hung.

  Campton meditated. The blush was the blush of Mr. Brant, but the voice was the voice of Julia. Still, it was probable that neither husband nor wife was aware how far matters had gone with Mrs. Talkett.

  “George is more involved than you think,” Campton said.

  Mr. Brant looked startled.

  “In what way?”

  “He means to marry her. He insists on her getting a divorce.”

  “A divorce? Good gracious,” murmured Mr. Brant. He turned over a jade paper-cutter, trying its edge absently on his nail. “Does Julia?” he began at length.

  Campton shook his head. “No; I wanted to speak to you first.”

  Mr. Brant gave his quick bow. He was evidently gratified, and the sentiment stimulated his faculties, as it had when he found that Campton no longer resented his presence at the hospital. His small effaced features took on a business-like sharpness, and he readjusted his eye-glasses and straightened the paper-cutter, which he had put back on the desk a fraction of an inch out of its habitual place.

  “You had this from George?” he asked.

  “No; from her. She’s been to see me. She doesn’t want to divorce. She’s in love with him; in her way, that is; but she’s frightened.”

  “And that makes him the more eager?”

  “The more determined, at any rate.”

  Mr. Brant appeared to seize the distinction. “George can be very determined.”

  “Yes. I think his mother ought to be made to understand that all this talk about a wretched entanglement isn’t likely to make him any less so.”

  Mr. Brant’s look seemed to say that making Julia understand had proved a no less onerous task for his maturity than for Campton’s youth.

  “If you don’t object—perhaps the matter might, for the present, continue to be kept between you and me,” he suggested.

  “Oh, by all means. What I want,” Campton pursued, “is to get him out of this business altogether. They wouldn’t be happy—they couldn’t be. She’s too much like” He broke off, frightened at what he had been about to say. “Too much,” he emended, “like the usual fool of a woman that every boy of George’s age thinks he wants simply because he can’t get her.”

  “And you say she came to you for advice?”

  “She came to me to persuade him to give up the idea of a divorce. Apparently she’s ready for anything short of that. It’s a queer business. She seems sorry for Talkett in a way.”

  Mr. Brant marked his sense of the weight of this by a succession of attentive nods. He put his hands in his pockets, leaned back, and tilted his dapper toes against the gold-trellised scrap-basket. The attitude seemed to change the pale panelling of his background into a glass-and-mahogany Wall Street office.

  “Won’t he be satisfied with—er—all the rest, so to speak; since you say she offers it?”

  “No; he won’t. There’s the difficulty. It seems it’s the new view. The way the young men feel since the war. He wants her for his wife. Nothing less.”

  “Ah, he respects her,” murmured Mr. Brant, impressed; and Campton reflected that he had no doubt respected Julia.

  “And what she wants is to get you to persuade him—to accept less?”

  “Well—something of the sort.”

  Mr. Brant sat up and dropped his heels to the floor. “Well, then—don’tr he snapped.

  “Don’t—?”

  “Persuade her, on the contrary, to keep him hoping—to make him think she means to marry him. Don’t you see?” Mr. Brant exclaimed, almost impatiently. “Don’t you see that if she turns him down definitely he’ll be scheming to get away, to get back to the front, the minute his leave is over? Tell her that—appeal to her on that ground. Make her do it. She will if she’s in love with him. And we can’t stop him from going back—not one of us. He’s restless here already—I know that. Always talking about his men, saying he’s got to get back to them. The only way is to hold him by this girl. She’s the very influence we need!”

  He threw it all out in sharp terse phrases, as a business man might try to hammer facts about an investment into the bewildered brain of an unpractical client. Campton felt the blood rising to his forehead, not so much in anger at Mr. Brant as at the sense of his own inward complicity.

  “There’s no earthly reason why George should ever go back to the front,” he said.

  “None whatever. We can get him any staff-job he chooses. His mother’s already got the half-promise of a post for him at the War Office. But you’ll see, you’ll see! We can’t stop him. Did we before? There’s only this woman who can do it!”

  Campton looked over the banker’s head at the reflection of the false Reynolds in the mirror. That any one should have been fool enough to pay a big price for such a patent fraud seemed to him as incomprehensible as his own present obtuseness seemed to the banker.

  “You do see, don’t you?” argued Mr. Brant anxiously.

  “Oh, I suppose so.” Campton slowly got to his feet. The adroit brush-work of the forged picture fascinated him, and he went up to look at it more closely. Mr. Brant pursued him with a gratified glance.

  “Ah, you’re admiring my Reynolds. I paid a thumping price for it—but that’s always my principle. Pay high, but get the best. It’s a better investment.”

  “Just so,” Campton assented dully. Mr. Brant seemed suddenly divided from him by the whole width of the gulf between that daub on the wall and a real Reynolds. They had nothing more to say to each other—nothing whatever. “Well, good-bye.” He held out his hand.

  “Think it over—think it over,” Mr. Brant called out after him as he enfiladed the sumptuous offices, a medalled veteran holding back each door.

  It was not until Campton was back at Montmartre, and throwing off his coat to get into his old studio clothes, that he felt in his pocket the weight of the forgotten concert-money. It was too late in the day to take it back to the bank, even if he had had the energy to retrace his steps; and he decided to hand the bag over to Boylston, with whom he was dining that night to meet the elder Dastrey, home on a brief leave from his ambulance.

  “Think it over!” Mr. Brant’s adjuration continued to echo in Campton’s ears. As if he needed to be told to think it over! Once again the war-worn world had vanished from his mind, and he saw only George, himself and George, George and safety, George and peace. They blamed women who were cowards about their husbands, mistresses who schemed to protect their lovers! Well—he was as bad as any one of them, if it came to that. His son had bought his freedom, had once offered his life and nearly lost it. Brant was right: at all costs they must keep him from rushing back into that hell.

  That Mrs. Talkett should be the means of securing his safety was bitter enough. This trivial barren creature to be his all—it seemed the parody of Campton’s own youth! And Julia, after all, had been only a girl when he had met her, inexperienced and still malleable. A man less absorbed in his art, less oblivious of the daily material details of life, might conceivably have made something of her. But this little creature, with her farrago of false ideas, her vanity, her restlessness, her undisguised desire to keep George and yet not lose her world, had probably reached the term of her development, and would trip on through an eternal infancy of fads and frenzies.

  Luckily, as Mr. Brant said, they could use her for the time; use her better, no doubt, than had she been a more finely tempered instrument. Campton was still pondering on these things as he set out for the restaurant where he had agreed to meet Boylston and Dastrey. At the foot of his own stairs he was surprised to run against Boylston under the porte-cochere. They gave each other a quick questioning look, as men did when they enco
untered each other unexpectedly in those days.

  “Anything up? Oh, the money—you’ve come for the money?” Campton remembered that he had left the bag upstairs.

  “The money? Haven’t you heard? Louis Dastrey’s killed,” said Boylston.

  They stood side by side in the doorway, while Campton’s darkened mind struggled anew with the mystery of fate. Almost every day now the same readjustment had to be gone through: the cowering averted mind dragged upward and forced to visualize a new gap in the ranks, and summon the remaining familiar figures to fill it up and blot it out. And today this cruel gymnastic was to be performed for George’s best friend, the elder Dastrey’s sole stake in life! Only a few days ago the lad had passed through Paris, just back from America, and in haste to rejoin his regiment; alive and eager, throbbing with ideas, with courage, mirth and irony—the very material France needed to rebuild her ruins and beget her sons! And now, struck down as George had been—not to rise like George…

  Once more the inner voice in Campton questioned distinctly: “Could you bear it?” and again he answered: “Less than ever!”

  Aloud he asked: “Paul?”

  “Oh, he went off at once. To break the news to Louis’ mother in the country.”

  “The boy was all Paul had left.”

  “Yes.”

  “What difference would it have made in the war, if he’d just stayed on at his job in America?”

  Boylston did not answer, and the two stood silent, looking out unseeingly at the black empty street. There was nothing left to say, nowadays, when such blows fell; hardly anything left to feel, it sometimes seemed.

  “Well, I suppose we must go and eat something,” the older man said; and arm in arm they went out into the darkness.

  When Campton returned home that night he sat down and, with the help of several pipes, wrote a note to Mrs. Talkett asking when she would receive him.

  Thereafter he tried to go back to his painting and to continue his daily visits to the Palais Royal office. But for the time nothing seemed to succeed with him. He threw aside his study of Mme. Lebel—he hung about the office, confused and idle, and with the ever clearer sense that there also things were disintegrating.