Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  Campton had fled to Montmartre to escape a number of things: first of all, the possibility of meeting people who would want to talk about the European situation, then of being called up by Mrs. Brant, and lastly of having to lunch alone in a fashionable restaurant. In his morbid dread of seeing people he would have preferred an omelette in the studio, if only Mariette had been at hand to make it; and he decided, after a vain struggle with his muddled “properties,” to cross over to the Luxembourg quarter and pick up a meal in a wine-shop.

  He did not own to himself his secret reason for this decision; but it caused him, after a glance at his watch, to hasten his steps down the rue Montmartre and bribe a passing taxi to carry him to the Museum of the Luxembourg. He reached it ten minutes before the midday closing, and hastening past the serried statues, turned into a room halfway down the gallery. Whistler’s Mother and the Carmencita of Sargent wondered at each other from its walls; and on the same wall with the Whistler hung the picture Campton had come for: his portrait of his son. He had given it to the Luxembourg the day after Mr. Brant had tried to buy it, with the object of inflicting the most cruel slight he could think of on the banker.

  In the generous summer light the picture shone out on him with a communicative warmth: never had he seen so far into its depths. “No wonder,” he thought, “it opened people’s eyes to what I was trying for.”

  He stood and stared his own eyes full, mentally comparing the features before him with those of the firmer harder George he had left on the terrace of the Crillon, and noting how time, while fulfilling the rich promise of the younger face, had yet taken something from its brightness.

  Campton, at that moment, found more satisfaction than ever in thinking how it must have humiliated Brant to have the picture given to France. “He could have understood my keeping it myself—or holding it for a bigger price—but giving it!” The satisfaction was worth the sacrifice of the best record he would ever have of that phase of his son’s youth. At various times afterward he had tried for the same George, but not one of his later studies had that magic light on it. Still, he was glad he had given the picture. It was safe, safer than it would have been with him. His great dread had always been that if his will were mislaid (and his things were always getting mislaid) the picture might be sold, and fall into Brant’s hands after his death.

  The closing signal drove him out of the Museum, and he turned into the first wine-shop. He had advised George to lunch with the Brants, but there was disappointment in his heart. Seeing the turn things were taking, he had hoped the boy would feel the impulse to remain with him. But, after all, at such a time a son could not refuse to go to his mother. Campton pictured the little party of three grouped about the luncheon-table in the high cool dining-room of the Avenue Marigny, with the famous Hubert Robert panels, and the Louis XV silver and Sevres; while he, the father, George’s father, sat alone at the soiled table of a frowsy wine-shop.

  Well—it was he who had so willed it. Life was too crazy a muddle—and who could have foreseen that he might have been repaid for twenty-six years with such a wife by keeping an undivided claim on such a son?

  His meal over, he hastened back to the studio, hoping to find the dancer there. Fortin-Lescluze had sworn to bring her at two, and Campton was known to exact absolute punctuality. He had put the final touch to his fame by refusing to paint the mad young Duchesse de la Tour Crenelee—who was exceptionally paintable—because she had kept him waiting three-quarters of an hour. But now, though it was nearly three, and the dancer and her friend had not come, Campton dared not move, lest he should miss Fortin-Lescluze.

  “Sent for by a rich patient in a war-funk; or else hanging about in the girl’s dressing-room while she polishes her toe-nails,” Campton reflected; and sulkily sat down to wait.

  He had never been willing to have a telephone. To him it was a live thing, a kind of Laocoon-serpent that caught one in its coils and dragged one struggling to the receiver. His friends had spent all their logic in trying to argue away this belief; but he answered obstinately: “Every one would be sure to call me up when Mariette was out.” Even the Russian lady, during her brief reign, had pleaded in vain on this point.

  He would have given a good deal now if he had listened to her. The terror of having to cope with small material difficulties, always strongest in him in moments of artistic inspiration—when the hushed universe seemed hardly big enough to hold him and his model—this dread anchored him to his seat while he tried to make up his mind to send Mme. Lebel to the nearest telephone-station.

  If he called to her, she would instantly begin: “And the war, sir?” And he would have to settle that first. Besides, if he did not telephone himself he could not make sure of another appointment with Fortin-Lescluze. But the idea of battling alone with the telephone in a public place covered his large body with a damp distress. If only George had been in reach!

  He waited till four, and then, furious, locked the studio and went down. Mme. Lebel still sat in her spidery den. She looked at him gravely, their eyes met, they exchanged a bow, but she did not move or speak. She was busy as usual with some rusty sewing—he thought it odd that she should not rush out to waylay him. Everything that day was odd.

  He found all the telephone-booths besieged. The people waiting were certainly bad cases of war-funk, to judge from their looks; after scrutinizing them for a while he decided to return to his hotel, and try to communicate with Fortin-Lescluze from there.

  To his annoyance there was not a taxi to be seen. He limped down the slope of Montmartre to the nearest métro-station, and just as he was preparing to force his lame bulk into a crowded train, caught sight of a solitary horse-cab: a vehicle he had not risked himself in for years.

  The cab-driver, for gastronomic reasons, declined to take him farther than the Madeleine; and getting out there, Campton walked along the rue Royale. Everything still looked wonderfully as usual; and the fountains in the Place sparkled gloriously.

  Comparatively few people were about: he was surprised to see how few. A small group of them, he noticed, had paused near the doorway of the Ministry of Marine, and were looking—without visible excitement—at a white paper pasted on the wall.

  He crossed the street and looked too. In the middle of the paper, in queer Gothic-looking characters, he saw the words “Les Armees de Terre et de Mer…”

  War had come—

  He knew now that he had never for an instant believed it possible. Even when he had had that white-lipped interview with the Brants, even when he had planned to take Fortin-Lescluze by his senile infatuation, and secure a medical certificate for George; even then, he had simply been obeying the superstitious impulse which makes a man carry his umbrella when he goes out on a cloudless morning.

  War had come.

  He stood on the edge of the sidewalk, and tried to think—now that it was here—what it really meant: that is, what it meant to him. Beyond that he had no intention of venturing. “This is not our job anyhow,” he muttered, repeating the phrase with which he had bolstered up his talk with Julia.

  But abstract thinking was impossible: his confused mind could only snatch at a few drifting scraps of purpose. “Let’s be practical,” he said to himself.

  The first thing to do was to get back to the hotel and call up the physician. He strode along at his fastest limp, suddenly contemptuous of the people who got in his way.

  “War—and they’ve nothing to do but dawdle and gape! How like the French!” He found himself hating the French.

  He remembered that he had asked to have his sleepings engaged for the following night. But even if he managed to secure his son’s discharge, there could be no thought, now, of George’s leaving the country; and he stopped at the desk to cancel the order.

  There was no one behind the desk: one would have said that confusion prevailed in the hall, if its emptiness had not made the word incongruous. At last a waiter with rumpled hair strayed out of the restaurant, and of him, imperiously, Ca
mpton demanded the concierges.

  “The concierges? He’s gone.”

  “To get my places for Naples?”

  The waiter looked blank. “Gone: mobilised—to join his regiment. It’s the war.”

  “But look here, some one must have attended to getting my places, I suppose,” cried Campton wrathfully. He invaded the inner office and challenged a secretary who was trying to deal with several unmanageable travellers, but who explained to him, patiently, that his sleeping had certainly not been engaged, as no trains were leaving Paris for the present. “Not for civilian travel,” he added, still more patiently.

  Campton had a sudden sense of suffocation. No trains leaving Paris “for the Present”? But then people like himself—people who had nothing on earth to do with the war—had been caught like rats in a trap! He reflected with a shiver that Mrs. Brant would not be able to return to Deauville, and would probably insist on his coming to see her every day. He asked: “How long is this preposterous state of things to last?”—but no one answered, and he stalked to the lift and had himself carried up-stairs.

  He was confident that George would be there waiting; but the sitting-room was empty. He felt as if he were on a desert island, with the last sail disappearing over the dark rim of the world.

  After much vain ringing he got into communication with Fortin’s house, and heard a confused voice saying that the physician had already left Paris.

  “Left—for where? For how long?”

  And then the eternal answer: “The doctor is mobilised. It’s the war.”

  Mobilised—already? Within the first twenty-four hours? A man of Fortin’s age and authority? Campton was terrified by the uncanny rapidity with which events were moving, he whom haste had always confused and disconcerted, as if there were a secret link between his lameness and the movements of his will. He rang up Dastrey, but no one answered. Evidently his friend was out, and his friend’s bonne also. “I suppose she’s mobilised: they’ll be mobilising the women next.”

  At last, from sheer over-agitation, his fatigued mind began to move more deliberately: he collected his wits, laboured with his more immediate difficulties, and decided that he would go to Fortin-Lescluze’s house, on the chance that the physician had not, after all, really started.

  “Ten to one he won’t go till tomorrow,” Campton reasoned.

  The hall of the hotel was emptier than ever, and no taxi was in sight down the whole length of the rue Royale, or the rue Boissy d’Anglas, or the rue de Rivoli: not even a horse-cab showed against the deserted distances. He crossed to the métro, and painfully descended its many stairs.

  

  VI.

  Campton, proffering twenty francs to an astonished maid-servant, learned that, yes, to his intimates—and of course Monsieur was one?—the doctor was in, was in fact dining, and did not leave till the next morning.

  “Dining—at six o’clock?”

  “Monsieur’s son, Monsieur Jean, is starting at once for his depot. That’s the reason.”

  Campton sent in his card. He expected to be received in the so-called “studio,” a lofty room with Chinese hangings, Renaissance choir-stalls, organ, grand piano, and post-impressionist paintings, where Fortin-Lescluze received the celebrities of the hour. Mme. Fortin never appeared there, and Campton associated the studio with amusing talk, hot-house flowers, and ladies lolling on black velvet divans. He supposed that the physician was separated from his wife, and that she had a home of her own.

  When the maid reappeared she did not lead him to the studio, but into a small dining-room with the traditional Henri II sideboard of waxed walnut, a hanging table-lamp under a beaded shade, an India-rubber plant on a plush pedestal, and napkins that were just being restored to their bone rings by the four persons seated about the red-and-white checkered table-cloth.

  These were: the great man himself, a tall large woman with grey hair, a tiny old lady, her face framed in a peasant’s fluted cap, and a plain young man wearing a private’s uniform, who had a nose like the doctor’s and simple light blue eyes.

  The two ladies and the young man—so much more interesting to the painter’s eye than the sprawling beauties of the studio—were introduced by Fortin-Lescluze as his wife, his mother and his son. Mme. Fortin said, in a deep alto, a word or two about the privilege of meeting the famous painter who had portrayed her husband, and the old mother, in a piping voice, exclaimed: “Monsieur, I was at Sedan in 1870. I saw the Germans. I saw the Emperor sitting on a bench. He was crying.”

  “My mother’s heard everything, she’s seen everything. There’s no one in the world like my mother!” the physician said, laying his hand on hers.

  “You won’t see the Germans again, ma bonne mère!” her daughter-in-law added, smiling.

  Campton took coffee with them, bore with a little inevitable talk about the war, and then eagerly questioned the son. The young man was a chemist, a preparateur in the laboratory of the Institut Pasteur. He was also, it appeared, given to prehistoric archaeology, and had written a “thesis” on the painted caves of the Dordogne. He seemed extremely serious, and absorbed in questions of science and letters. But it appeared to him perfectly simple to be leaving it all in a few hours to join his regiment. “The war had to come. This sort of thing couldn’t go on,” he said, in the words of Mme. Lebel.

  He was to start in an hour, and Campton excused himself for intruding on the family, who seemed as happily united, as harmonious in their deeper interests, as if no musical studio-parties and exotic dancers had ever absorbed the master of the house.

  Campton, looking at the group, felt a pang of envy, and thought, for the thousandth time, how frail a screen of activity divided him from depths of loneliness he dared not sound. “‘For every man hath business and desire,’” he muttered as he followed the physician.

  In the consulting-room he explained: “It’s about my son”

  He had not been able to bring the phrase out in the presence of the young man who must have been just George’s age, and who was leaving in an hour for his regiment. But between Campton and the father there were complicities, and there might therefore be accommodations. In the consulting-room one breathed a lower air.

  It was not that Campton wanted to do anything underhand. He was genuinely anxious about George’s health. After all, tuberculosis did not disappear in a month or even a year: his anxiety was justified. And then George, but for the stupid accident of his birth, would never have been mixed up in the war. Campton felt that he could make his request with his head high.

  Fortin-Lescluze seemed to think so too; at any rate he expressed no surprise. But could anything on earth have surprised him, after thirty years in the confessional of a room?

  The difficulty was that he did not see his way to doing anything—not immediately, at any rate.

  “You must let the boy join his base. He leaves tomorrow? Give me the number of his regiment and the name of the town, and trust me to do what I can.”

  “But you’re off yourself?”

  “Yes: I’m being sent to a hospital at Lyons. But I’ll leave you my address.”

  Campton lingered, unable to take this as final. He looked about him uneasily, and then, for a moment, straight into the physician’s eyes.

  “You must know how I feel; your boy is an only son, too.”

  “Yes, yes,” the father assented, in the absent-minded tone of professional sympathy. But Campton felt that he felt the deep difference.

  “Well, goodbye—and thanks.”

  As Campton turned to go the physician laid a hand on his shoulder and spoke with sudden fierce emotion. “Yes: Jean is an only son—an only child. For his mother and myself it’s not a trifle—having our only son in the war.”

  There was no allusion to the dancer, no hint that Fortin remembered her; it was Campton who lowered his gaze before the look in the other father’s eyes.

  

  VII.

  “A son in the war”

  Th
e words followed Campton down the stairs. What did it mean, and what must it feel like, for parents in this safe denationalized modern world to be suddenly saying to each other with white lips: A son in the war?

  He stood on the kerbstone, staring ahead of him and forgetting whither he was bound. The world seemed to lie under a spell, and its weight was on his limbs and brain. Usually any deep inward trouble made him more than ever alive to the outward aspect of things; but this new world in which people talked glibly of sons in the war had suddenly become invisible to him, and he did not know where he was, or what he was staring at. He noted the fact, and remembered a story of St. Bernard—he thought it was—walking beside a beautiful lake in supersensual ecstasy, and saying afterward: “Was there a lake? I didn’t see it.”

  On the way back to the hotel he passed the American Embassy, and had a vague idea of trying to see the Ambassador and find out if the United States were not going to devise some way of evading the tyrannous regulation that bound young Americans to France. “And they call this a free country!” he heard himself exclaiming.

  The remark sounded exactly like one of Julia’s, and this reminded him that the Ambassador frequently dined at the Brants’. They had certainly not left his door untried; and since, to the Brant circles, Campton was still a shaggy Bohemian, his appeal was not likely to fortify theirs.

  His mind turned to Jorgenstein, and the vast web of the speculator’s financial relations. But, after all, France was on the verge of war, if not in it; and following up the threads of the Jorgenstein web was likely to land one in Frankfort or Vienna.

  At the hotel he found his sitting-room empty; but presently the door opened and George came in laden with books, fresh yellow and grey ones in Flammarion wrappers.

  “Hullo, Dad,” he said; and added: “So the silly show is on.”

  “Mobilisation is not war,” said Campton.