The New York paper came out with a story about the painter, saying that he had been in an air crash, and this was his own experience. Marcel was annoyed for a while; he hated that sort of publicity. But to Beauty it was marvelous; it set everybody to talking about her husband, and visitors came to the house again, and she had an excuse to get out her pretty clothes. She had a vision of her husband becoming a famous and highly paid magazine illustrator; but Marcel said, to hell with it, and jammed his red silk skullcap down on his head and stalked off to the studio to brood there. So Beauty had to run to him, and fall on her knees and admit that she was a cheap and silly creature, and that Marcel was to paint whatever he wanted, and needn’t see a single one of the curiosity seekers—they would disconnect the bell at the gate if he wished it.
However, Lanny managed to get his way about one thing; Marcel promised not to burn any more of his work. On this point the boy collected historical facts from painter friends and retailed them to his stepfather. “We have all Michelangelo’s sketches, and Leonardo’s, and Rembrandt’s, and Rodin’s—so we can follow their minds, and learn what they were thinking and trying. We learn from what they rejected as well as from what they kept.” So it was agreed that everything Marcel did from that time on was to be put away on shelves in the storeroom; and, furthermore, Lanny might be allowed to see something now and then—but no more publicity.
15
Amor inter Arma
I
Just before Christmas, Mrs. Emily Chattersworth returned to Cannes, and opened her winter home. She needed a rest, so she told her friends; but she didn’t take it for long. There were too many wounded French soldiers all over the Midi; tens of thousands of them, and many as bad as Marcel. The casino at Juan—a small place at that time—had been turned into a hospital, as had all sorts of public buildings throughout France. But there was never room enough, never help enough. Frenchwomen, who as a rule confined their activities to their own homes, were now organizing hospitals and relief depots; and of course they were glad to have help from anyone who would give it.
So it wasn’t long before Mrs. Emily was agitating and organizing, making her American friends on the Riviera ashamed of wasting their time playing bridge and dancing; she told them stories about men deprived of hands and feet and eyes and what not, and facing the problem of how to keep alive. In the end, impatient of delays, Mrs. Emily turned her own home into an institution for what was called “re-education”: teaching new occupations to men so crippled they could no longer practice their former ones. A man who had lost his right hand would learn to do something with a hook, and men who had lost their legs would learn to make baskets or brooms. Mrs. Emily moved herself into what had been a maid’s room, and filled up her whole mansion with her “pupils,” and when that wasn’t enough, put up tents on her lawns.
The wife of Marcel Detaze was especially exposed to this vigorous lady’s attacks. “Don’t you care about anybody’s husband but your own?” Beauty was ashamed to give the wrong answer, and after she had made sure that Marcel was occupied with his painting, Lanny would drive her up to Sept Chênes, as the place was called, and give what help she could. She didn’t know how to make brooms or baskets, and as a “re-educator” she wasn’t very much, but she was the world’s wonder when it came to uplifting the souls of men. Suffering had dealt kindly with her, and added a touch of mystery to her loveliness, and when she came into the room all the mutilés would stop looking at brooms and baskets, and if she said something to a poor devil he would remember it the rest of the day. After what she had been through with Marcel, she didn’t mind seeing scars of war, and she learned to get the same thrill which in the old days she had got from entering a ballroom and having “important” people stare at her and ask who she was.
It was good for Lanny too, because the world he was going to live in was not to be composed exclusively of “important” persons, manifesting grace and charm at enormous expense. Going to Mrs. Emily’s was a kind of “slumming” which not even Robbie could have objected to; and Lanny had an advantage over his mother in that he knew Provençal, and could chat with these peasants and fishermen as he had done all his life. Several of them were the same persons he had known, fathers or older brothers of the children he had played with.
And oddest circumstance of all—Lanny’s gigolo! That happy and graceful dancing man whom he had picked up in Nice, and who had come to Bienvenu and spent an afternoon playing the piccolo flute and demonstrating the steps of the farandole! Here he was, drawing a harsh breath now and then, because he had got trapped in a dugout full of fumes from a shell; and surely he would never dance again, because his right leg was gone just below the hip. Instead he was learning to carve little dancing figures out of wood, and when he was through with that form of education, he would go back to his father’s farm, where there was wood in plenty, and the organization which Mrs. Emily had formed would try to sell his toys for the Christmas trade. M. Pinjon was the same kindly and gentle dreamer that Lanny recalled, and the boy had the satisfaction of seeing his mother willing to talk to him now, and hearing her admit that he was a good creature, who doubtless had done no harm to anyone in his life.
II
One of Mrs. Emily’s bright ideas was that men who had hands and eyes but no feet might learn to paint. Of course it was late in life for them to begin, but then look at Gauguin, look at van Gogh—you just could never tell where you might find a genius. Might it not be possible for Marcel to come now and then and give a lesson to these pitiful souls?
Marcel was coming to care less and less for people. Even the best of them made him aware of his own condition, and it was only when he was alone and buried in his work that life was bearable to him. But he heard Beauty talking for hours at a time about Emily Chattersworth, and of course this work came close to his heart. He too was a mutilé, and a comrade of all the others. He couldn’t teach anything, because he couldn’t talk; even Mrs. Emily had a hard time understanding him, unless Beauty sat by and said some of the words over again. But he offered to come and entertain them by making sketches on a blackboard—for example, those little German devils that seemed to amuse people. Somebody else might explain and comment on the work as he did it.
So they drove up to Sept Chênes one evening. Mrs. Emily had set up a blackboard, and had got one of her patients to do the talking, a journalist who had lost the fingers of his right hand and was learning to write with his left. He was an amusing talker, and Marcel with his skullcap and veil was a figure of mystery. He was clever and quick at sketching, and his Prussian devils made the audience roar. The deaf ones could see them, and the blind ones could hear about them. If the lecturer missed a point, Marcel would write a word or two on the board. It wasn’t long before the men were shouting what they wanted next, and Marcel would draw that. He had been at the front long enough to know the little touches that made things real to his comrades.
He drew a heroic figure of the poilu. Poil means your hair, and is a symbol of your power. The poilu was a mighty fellow, and wore a red military képi, with a depression in the round top like a saucer. When Marcel drew a rough wooden cross in a field, and hung one of those battered caps on top of it, every man in the room knew what that meant, for he had seen thousands of them. The poilu wore a long coat, and when he was marching he buttoned back the front flaps to make room for his legs, so when you saw that, you knew he was on the march. If his face was set grimly, you knew he was going to say: “Nous les aurons,” that is: “We’ll have them, we’ll get them.”
What he was going to get was the boche. That was another word of the war. The British called him “Jerry,” and the Yanks, when they came along, would call him “Heinie,” and sometimes “Fritzie”; but to the poilu he was le boche, and when Marcel drew him, he made him not ugly or hateful, just stupid and discouraged, and that too seemed right to anciens combattants. When Marcel desired to draw something hateful, it wore a long coat to the ankles, tightly drawn in at the waist, and a monocl
e, and a gold bracelet, and an expression of monstrous insolence.
III
That visit was important to the painter because it gave him a place to go. With these poor devils he need never be ashamed, never humiliated. He would return now and then to entertain them; or he would go and just talk with them, or rather, let them talk to him. One of them had been with Marcel’s own regiment in the Alpes Maritimes, and from him Marcel learned that his comrades had been moved to the front in the Vosges mountains, and what had happened to them there.
The men wouldn’t talk to strangers about the war; it was too terrible, it would discourage people. But among themselves it was all right, and Marcel’s mutilated face was a passport to all hearts. He heard about winter fighting in heavy snow, with the trenches only a few yards apart, so that you could hear the enemy talking, and shout abuse and defiance at him; if you lifted your cap an inch above the parapet, it would be riddled with bullets in a second or two. Shelling was incessant, day and night, and hand grenades were thrown; only a few sentries stayed to watch, while the rest hid in dugouts underground. Great tracts in the forest had been reduced to splinters, and in the poste de secours, a shelter dug half under the hillside, a dozen doctors had been killed in the course of a year. No going about at all in the daytime; yet you could hear the church bells ringing in a village behind the lines. One of the stories was about a man who picked up an old hand organ in one of the buildings wrecked by shells, and brought it up one rainy night to one of the cagnas, or dugouts, and stood outside in the rain playing it, and men began singing, hundreds of them all over the place, even with the shells falling around. “Sidi Brahim,” they sang.
Among other things, Lanny learned what had happened to his mother’s former chauffeur and handy man, Sergeant Pierre Bazoche. He had taken part in one of those innumerable attempts that came to nothing. Line after line of men had charged across an exposed place on a hillside, and just lay where they fell. There was no way to get to them; those who were not killed at once died slowly—but in any case they stayed all winter, and the smell of them made an invisible cloud that drifted slowly over the trenches, sometimes to the poilus and sometimes to the boches.
After talks like that Marcel would go back and paint. He made a painting that he called “Fear,” and for a while he didn’t want anybody to see it; perhaps it was a confession of something in himself. He was so proud, so serene, and full of ardor for his beloved France—could it be that he had ever been terrified? The truth is that this complicated arrangement of pipes and tissues that comprise a man is so fragile, so soft and easily damaged, that nature has provided an automatic impulse to protect it. There are parts of it that can hurt so abominably—and in truth you would have difficulty in naming any part that you would care to have struck by a little steel cylinder moving at the rate of half a mile per second. The boches had this same feeling, and many Catholics among them carried on their persons magic formulas containing detailed specifications. “May God preserve me against all manner of arms and weapons, shot and cannon, long or short swords, knives or daggers, or carbines, halberds, or any thing that cuts or pierces, against thrusts of rapiers, long and short rifles, or guns, and suchlike, which have been forged since the birth of Christ; against all kinds of metal, be it iron or steel, brass or lead, ore or wood.” The poor devils lay dead upon the field with these prayers in their pockets.
Marcel painted a dim, mysterious form, the upper part of a human being, you couldn’t be sure whether it was man or woman; it was shrouded in a sort of dark hood, and you saw only the face, and at first only the eyes, which had a faint glow, and were staring at you with a look that seized your own. The face was not distorted, the expression was subtler than that, it was a soul which had been acquainted with fear for a long time; and not just a physical fear, but a moral horror at a society in which men inflicted such things upon one another.
At least, that is what M. Rochambeau said after he had looked at the picture for a long time. He said it was quite extraordinary, and certainly none of the persons who saw it ever forgot it. But Marcel put it away. He said it wasn’t a picture for wartime—not until the enemy could see it too!
IV
The British had failed in their efforts to take the Dardanelles, largely because they couldn’t decide whether the taking was worth the cost. Now they were starting an advance from Salonika, a harbor in the north of Greece. That country had a pro-German king, and those beautiful islands which the Bluebird had visited had become lurking places of submarines seeking to destroy British commerce and the troopships which came heavily loaded from India and Australia. The entire Mediterranean was the scene of unresting naval war, and Lanny didn’t need to look at war maps, because he had been to the places and had pictures of them in his eager mind.
When he and Jerry went fishing they watched every ship that passed—and there were great numbers—knowing that at any moment there might be an explosion and a pillar of black smoke. They never happened to see that, but they heard firing more than once, and ran to a high point of the Cap and with field glasses watched a sinking ship, and saw motorboats hurrying out to bring off survivors. Up and down the coast people told stories of hospital ships sunk with all on board, of loaded troopships torpedoed, of submarines rammed, or sunk by a well-aimed shot, or getting entangled in the chains and nets now set in front of harbors.
The fighting at Gallipoli had one important consequence for Lanny. The father of Rosemary Codwilliger was wounded, and in a hospital in Malta; this made the mother decide to spend the winter on the Riviera, where he could join her when he was able to be moved. “She says she’s in need of a rest,” wrote the girl, “but I think it’s to get me out of the notion of nursing. She’s afraid I’ll get to know people outside our social circle.”
The family wanted a quiet place, Rosemary added, and it happened that the Baroness Sophie had a little villa on the Cap, not the one she lived in. Lanny sent a snapshot of it to the girl, and as a result her family rented the place and set a date for their arrival; the mother, a widowed aunt, Rosemary herself, and her father whenever the doctors and the submarines would let him.
Lanny was sixteen now, and old enough to know that he was interested in girls. This grave and sweet English lass had captured his imagination, and he looked back upon the river Thames and its green and pleasant land as one of his happiest memories. He had met other girls on the Riviera, and had swum and boated and danced with them, but principally they interested him because they reminded him of Rosemary.
A year and a half had passed, and now she was coming, and Lanny hoped to be included in her social circle. His mother was a respectable married woman, and his stepfather had all but given his life in the war which was England’s. Lanny had never met Rosemary’s mother or aunt, but he hoped for success with them as in the case of the Frau Doktor Hofrat von und zu Nebenaltenberg—who now, by the way, was among the Germans interned on the Île Ste.-Marguerite, which Lanny could view from the veranda of his home.
The boy had told his mother about the English girl and how much he liked her; it would have been cruelty to withhold such news from Beauty, to whom it was the most interesting of subjects. She warned him not to expect too much from the English, because they were a peculiar people, rigidly bound by their own conventions. With Americans they were apt to go so far and no farther.
Just now Beauty had another love affair on her hands, that of Jerry Pendleton, who clamored for advice about French girls. He was finding in one of them such an odd mixture of fervor and reserve; and such a complication of mothers and aunts! Did Mrs. Detaze think that an American could be happy with a French wife? And would such a wife be happy in America? The situation was complicated by the fact that Jerry didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself. He had come away fully determined to escape the drug store business; he dreamed of being a newspaperman, perhaps a foreign correspondent. But what would he do with a wife under those circumstances? Lanny’s tutor, torn between his destinies, was much li
ke Beauty having to choose between Pittsburgh and the Cap d’Antibes. Lanny’s lessons suffered during the discussions—but he could always go and read the encyclopedia.
V
The three ladies and a maid arrived, and Lanny was at the train to meet them and take them to the villa. He had the keys, and knew the place and showed it to them. He had lived on the Cap all his life, and could tell them about the shops and services and other practical matters. Also he knew about servants—the innumerable relatives of Leese were available and the ladies had only to choose. The most exclusive English family could hardly reject the assistance of such a polite and agreeable youth.
Mrs. Codwilliger was a tall, thin-faced lady from whom Lanny might have learned how Rosemary would look when she was forty; but he didn’t. She and her sister, tall and still thinner, were the daughters of Lord Dewthorpe, and estimated themselves accordingly. But when Lanny’s mother offered to call, they could not say no; and when they heard the romantic story of the painter who stayed in his studio alone, never appearing in public without a veil, their deep English instincts of self-sufficiency were touched. When Lanny offered to lend them several of his stepfather’s seascapes to remedy the rather crude taste in art of the baroness, they had to admit that the habitability of their home had been increased.
Rosemary was a year older than Lanny, which meant that she was now a young lady. As it happened, she was a very grand one, belonging to a set which managed to impress other people—they “got away with it,” to use the American slang. The youth was prepared to worship her at a distance. But they strolled off, and sat where they could see the moonlight flung across the water in showers of brilliant fire. There was a distant sound of music from the great hotel—all the lovely things which they remembered on the banks of the Thames.
World's End Page 31
