Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  John Campton, henceforth, was merely the unsuccessful son of a ruined manufacturer; painting became a luxury lie could no longer afford, and his mother and sisters besought him to come back and take over what was left of the business. It seemed so clearly his duty that, with anguish of soul, he prepared to go; but Juli£, on being consulted, developed a sudden passion for art and poverty.

  “We’d have to live in Utica—for some years at any rate?”

  “Well, yes, no doubt” They faced the fact desolately.

  “They’d much better look out for another manager. What do you know about business? Since you’ve taken up painting you’d better try to make a success of that,” she advised him; and he was too much of the same mind not to agree.

  It was not long before George’s birth, and they were fully resolved to go home for the event, and thus spare their lioped-for heir the inconvenience of coming into the world, like his father, in a foreign country. But now this was not to be thought of, and the eventual inconvenience to George was lost sight of by his progenitors in the contemplation of nearer problems.

  For a few years their life dragged along shabbily and depressingly. Now that Campton’s painting was no longer an amateur’s hobby but a domestic obligation, Julia thought it her duty to interest herself in it; and her only idea of doing so was by means of what she called “relations,” using the word in its French and diplomatic sense.

  She was convinced that her husband’s lack of success was due to Beausite’s blighting epigram, and to Campton’s subsequent resolve to strike out for himself. “It’s a great mistake to try to be original till people have got used to you,” she said, with the shrewdness that sometimes startled him. “If you’d only been civil to Beausite he would have ended by taking you up, and then you could have painted as queerly as you liked.”

  Beausite, by this time, had succumbed to the honours which lie in wait for such talents, and in his starred and titled maturity his earlier dread of rivals had given way to a prudent benevolence. Young artists were always welcome at the receptions he gave in his sumptuous hotel of the Avenue du Bois. Those who threatened to be rivals were even invited to dine; and Julia was justified in triumphing when such an invitation finally rewarded her efforts.

  Campton, with a laugh, threw the card into the stove.

  “If you’d only understand that that’s not the way,” he said.

  “What is, then?”

  “Why, letting all that lot see what unutterable rubbish one thinks them!”

  “I should have thought you’d tried that long enough,” she said with pale lips; but he answered jovially that it never palled on him.

  She was bitterly offended; but she knew Campton by this time, and was not a woman to waste herself in vain resentment. She simply suggested that since he would not profit by Beausite’s advance the only alternative was to try to get orders for portraits; and though at that stage he was not in the mood for portrait-painting, he made an honest attempt to satisfy her. She began, of course, by sitting for him. She sat again and again; but, lovely as she was, he was not inspired, and one day, in sheer self-defence, he blurted out that she was not paintable. She never forgot the epithet, and it loomed large in their subsequent recriminations.

  Adele Anthony—it was just like her—gave him his first order, and she did prove paintable. Campton made a success of her long crooked pink-nosed face; but she didn’t perceive it (she had wanted something oval, with tulle, and a rose in a tape hand), and after heroically facing the picture for six months she hid it away in an attic, whence, a year or so before the date of the artist’s present musings, it had been fished out as an “early Campton,” to be exhibited half a dozen times, and have articles written about it in the leading art reviews.

  Adele’s picture acted as an awful warning to intending patrons, and after one or two attempts at depicting mistrustful friends Campton refused to constrain his muse, and no more was said of portrait-painting. But life in Paris was growing too expensive. He persuaded Julia to try Spain, and they wandered about there for a year. She was not fault-finding, she did not complain, but she hated travelling, she could not eat things cooked in oil, and his pictures seemed to her to be growing more and more ugly and unsalable.

  Finally they came one day to Ronda, after a trying sojourn at Cordova. In the train Julia had moaned a little at the mosquitoes of the previous night, and at the heat and dirt of the second-class compartment; then, always conscious of the ill-breeding of fretfulness, she had bent her lovely head above her Tauchnitz. And it was then that Campton, looking out of the window to avoid her fatally familiar profile, had suddenly discovered another. It was that of a peasant girl in front of a small whitewashed house, under a white pergola hung with bunches of big red peppers. The house, which was close to the railway, was propped against an orange-coloured rock, and in the glare cast up from the red earth its walls looked as blue as snow in shadow. The girl was all blue-white too, from her cotton skirt to the kerchief knotted turbanwise above two folds of blue-black hair. Her round forehead and merry nose were relieved like a bronze medallion against the wall; and she stood with her hands on her hips, laughing at a little pig asleep under a cork-tree, who lay on his side like a dog.

  The vision filled the carriage-window and then vanished; but it remained so sharply impressed on Campton that even then he knew what was going to happen. He leaned back with a sense of relief, and forgot everything else.

  The next morning he said to his wife: “There’s a little place up the line that I want to go back and paint. You don’t mind staying here a day or two, do you?”

  She said she did not mind; it was what she always said; but he was somehow aware that this was the particular grievance she had always been waiting for. He did not care for that, or for anything but getting a seat in the diligence which started every morning for the village nearest the white house. On the way he remembered that he had left Julia only forty pesetas, but he did not care about that either… He stayed a month, and when he returned to Ronda his wife had gone back to Paris, leaving a letter to say that the matter was in the hands of her lawyers.

  “What did you do it for—I mean in that particular way? For goodness knows I understand all the rest,” Adele Anthony had once asked him, while the divorce proceedings were going on; and he had shaken his head, conscious that he could not explain.

  It was a year or two later that he met the first person who did understand: a Russian lady who had heard the story, was curious to know him, and asked, one day, when their friendship had progressed, to see the sketches he had brought back for his fugue.

  “Comme je vous comprends!” she murmured, her grey eyes deep in his; but perceiving that she did not allude to the sketches, but to his sentimental adventure, Campton pushed the drawings out of sight, vexed with himself for having shown them.

  He forgave the Russian lady her artistic obtuseness for the sake of her human comprehension. They had met at the loneliest moment of his life, when his art seemed to have failed him like everything else, and when the struggle to get possession of his son, which had been going on in the courts ever since the break with Julia, had finally been decided against him. His Russian friend consoled, amused and agitated him, and after a few years drifted out of his life as irresponsibly as she had drifted into it; and he found himself, at forty-five, a lonely thwarted man, as full as ever of faith in his own powers, but with little left in human nature or in opportunity. It was about this time that he heard that Julia was to marry again, and that his boy would have a stepfather.

  He knew that even his own family thought it “the best thing that could happen.” They were tired of clubbing together to pay Julia’s alimony, and heaved a united sigh of relief when they learned that her second choice had fallen, not on the bankrupt “foreign Count” they had always dreaded, but on the Paris partner of the famous bank of Bullard and Brant. Mr. Brant’s request that his wife’s alimony should be discontinued gave him a moral superiority which even Campton�
��s recent successes could not shake. It was felt that the request expressed the contempt of an income easily counted in seven figures for a pittance painfully screwed up to four; and the Camptons admired Mr. Brant much more for not needing their money than for refusing it.

  Their attitude left John Campton without support in his struggle to keep a hold on his boy. His family sincerely thought George safer with the Brants than with his own father, and the father could advance to the contrary no arguments they would have understood. All the forces of order seemed leagued against him; and it was perhaps this fact that suddenly drove him into conformity with them. At any rate, from the day of Julia’s remarriage no other woman shared her former husband’s life. Campton settled down to the solitude of his dusty studio at Montmartre, and painted doggedly, all his thoughts on George.

  At this point in his reminiscences the bells of Sainte Clotilde rang out the half-hour after midnight, and Campton rose and went into the darkened sitting-room.

  The door into George’s room was open, and in the silence the father heard the boy’s calm breathing. A light from the bathroom cast its ray on the dressing-table, which was scattered with the contents of George’s pockets. Campton, dwelling with a new tenderness on everything that belonged to his son, noticed a smart antelope card-case (George had his mother’s weakness for Bond Street novelties), a wrist-watch, his studs, a bundle of bank-notes; and beside these a thumbed and dirty red book, the size of a large pocket diary.

  The father wondered what it was; then of a sudden he knew. He had once seen Mme. Lebel’s grandson pull just such a red book from his pocket as he was leaving for his “twenty-eight days” of military service; it was the livret militaire that every French citizen under forty-eight carries about with him.

  Campton had never paid much attention to French military regulations: George’s service over, he had dismissed the matter from his mind, forgetting that his son was still a member of the French army, and as closely linked to the fortunes of France as the grandson of the concierges of Montmartre. Now it occurred to him that that little red book would answer the questions he had not dared to put; and stealing in, he possessed himself of it and carried it back to the sitting-room. There he sat down by the lamp and read.

  First George’s name, his domicile, his rank as a marechal des logis of dragoons, the number of his regiment and its base: all that was already familiar. But what was this on the next page?

  “In case of general mobilisation announced to the populations of France by public proclamations, or by notices posted in the streets, the bearer of this order is to rejoin his regiment at.

  “He is to take with him provisions for one day.”

  “He is to present himself at the station ofon the third day of mobilisation at 6 o’clock to 24 o’clock. The first day is that on which the order of mobilisation is published.”

  “The days of mobilisation are counted from 0 o’clock to 24 o’clock. The first day is that on which the order of mobilisation is published.”

  Campton dropped the book and pressed his hands to his temples. “The days of mobilisation are counted from 0 o’clock to 24 o’clock. The first day is that on which the order of mobilisation is published.” Then, if France mobilised that day, George would start the second day after, at six in the morning. George might be going to leave him within forty-eight hours from that very moment!

  Campton had always vaguely supposed that, some day or other, if war came, a telegram would call George to his base; it had never occurred to him that every detail of the boy’s military life had long since been regulated by the dread power which had him in its grasp.

  He read the next paragraph: “The bearer will travel free of charge” and thought with a grin how it would annoy Anderson Brant that the French government should presume to treat his stepson as if he could not pay his way. The plump bundle of bank-notes on the dressing-table seemed to look with ineffectual scorn at the red book that sojourned so democratically in the same pocket. And Campton, picturing George jammed into an overcrowded military train, on the plebeian wooden seat of a third-class compartment, grinned again, forgetful of his own anxiety in the vision of Brant’s exasperation.

  Ah, well, it wasn’t war yet, whatever they said!

  He carried the red book back to the dressing-table. The light falling across the bed drew his eye to the young face on the pillow. George lay on his side, one arm above his head, the other laxly stretched along the bed. He had thrown off the blankets, and the sheet, clinging to his body, modelled his slim flank and legs as he lay in dreamless rest.

  For a long time Campton stood gazing; then he stole back to the sitting-room, picked up a sketch-book and pencil and returned. He knew there was no danger of waking George, and he began to draw, eagerly but deliberately, fascinated by the happy accident of the lighting, and of the boy’s position.

  “Like a statue of a young knight I’ve seen somewhere,” he said to himself, vexed and surprised that he, whose plastic memories were always so precise, should not remember where; and then his pencil stopped. What he had really thought was: “Like the effigy of a young knight”—though he had instinctively changed the word as it formed itself. He leaned in the doorway, the sketch-book in hand, and continued to gaze at his son. It was the clinging sheet, no doubt, that gave him that look … and the white glare of the electric burner.

  If war came, that was just the way a boy might lie on a battlefield—or afterward in a hospital bed. Not his boy, thank heaven; but very probably his boy’s friends: hundreds and thousands of boys like his boy, the age of his boy, with a laugh like his boy’s… The wicked waste of it! Well, that was what war meant … what tomorrow might bring to millions of parents like himself.

  He stiffened his shoulders, and opened the sketch-book again. What watery stuff was he made of, he wondered? Just because the boy lay as if he were posing for a tombstone! … What of Signorelli, who had sat at his dead son’s side and drawn him, tenderly, minutely, while the coffin waited?

  Well, damn Signorelli—that was all! Campton threw down his book, turned out the sitting-room lights, and limped away to bed.

  

  V.

  The next morning he said to George, over coffee on the terrace: “I think I’ll drop in at Cook’s about our tickets.”

  George nodded, munching his golden roll.

  “Right. I’ll run up to see mother, then.”

  His father was silent. Inwardly he was saying to himself: “The chances are she’ll be going back to Deauville this afternoon.”

  There had not been much to gather from the newspapers heaped at their feet. Austria had ordered general mobilisation; but while the tone of the despatches was nervous and contradictory that of the leading articles remained almost ominously reassuring. Campton absorbed the reassurance without heeding its quality: it was a drug he had to have at any price.

  He expected the Javanese dancer to sit for him that afternoon, but he had not proposed to George to be present. On the chance that things might eventually take a wrong turn he meant to say a word to Fortin-Lescluze; and the presence of his son would have been embarrassing.

  “You’ll be back for lunch?” he called to George, who still lounged on the terrace in pyjamas.

  “Rather.—This, unless mother makes a point… in case she’s leaving.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Campton with grim cordiality.

  “You see, dear old boy, I’ve got to see Uncle Andy some time…” It was the grotesque name that George in his babyhood, had given to Mr. Brant, and when he grew up it had been difficult to substitute another. “Especially now” George added, pulling himself up out of his chair.

  “Now?”

  They looked at each other in silence, irritation in the father’s eye, indulgent amusement in the son’s.

  “Why, if you and I are really off on this long trek”

  “Oh, of course,” agreed Campton, relieved. “You’d much better lunch with them. I always want you to do what’s decent
.” He paused on the threshold to add: “By the way, don’t forget Adele.”

  “Well, rather not,” his son responded. “And we’ll keep the evening free for something awful.”

  As he left the room he heard George rapping on the telephone and calling out Miss Anthony’s number.

  Campton had to have reassurance at any price; and he got it, as usual, irrationally but irresistibly, through his eyes. The mere fact that the midsummer sun lay so tenderly on Paris, that the bronze dolphins of the fountains in the square were spraying the Nereids’ Louis Philippe chignons as playfully as ever; that the sleepy Cities of France dozed as heavily on their thrones, and the Horses of Marly pranced as fractiously on their pedestals; that the glorious central setting of the city lay there in its usual mellow pomp—all this gave him a sense of security that no crisscrossing of Reuters and Havases could shake.

  Nevertheless, he reflected that there was no use in battling with the silly hysterical crowd he would be sure to encounter at Cook’s; and having left word with the hotel-porter to secure two “sleepings” on the Naples express, he drove to the studio.

  On the way, as his habit was, he thought hard of his model: everything else disappeared like a rolled-up curtain, and his inner vision centred itself on the little yellow face he was to paint.

  Peering through her cobwebby window, he saw old Mme. Lebel on the watch. He knew she wanted to pounce out and ask if there would be war; and composing his most taciturn countenance he gave her a preoccupied nod and hurried by.

  The studio looked grimy and disordered, and he remembered that he had intended, the evening before, to come back and set it to rights. In pursuance of this plan, he got out a canvas, fussed with his brushes and colours, and then tried once more to make the place tidy. But his attempts at order always resulted in worse confusion; the fact had been one of Julia’s grievances against him, and he had often thought that a reaction from his ways probably explained the lifeless neatness of the Anderson Brant drawing-room.