Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  The two letters bore one another out in a way which carried conviction. Campton saw that his sudden doubts must have been produced (since he had not felt them that morning) by the agonizing experience he had undergone: the vision of Benny Upsher had unmanned him. George was safe, and asked only to remain so: that was evident from both letters. And as the certainty of his son’s acquiescence once more penetrated Campton it brought with it a fresh reaction of shame. Ashamed—yes, he had begun to be ashamed of George as well as of himself. Under the touch of Adele Anthony’s implacable honesty his last pretenses shrivelled up, and he longed to abase himself. He lifted his head and looked at her, remembering all she would be able to read in his eyes.

  “You’re satisfied?” she enquired.

  “Yes. If that’s the word.” He stretched his hand toward her, and then drew it back. “But it’s not: it’s not the word any longer.” He laboured with the need of self-expression, and the opposing instinct of concealing feelings too complex for Miss Anthony’s simple gaze. How could he say: “I’m satisfied; but I wish to God that George were not”? And was he satisfied, after all? And how could he define, or even be sure that he was actually experiencing, a feeling so contradictory that it seemed to be made up of anxiety for his son’s safety, shame at that anxiety, shame at George’s own complacent acceptance of his lot, and terror of a possible change in that lot? There were hours when it seemed to Campton that the Furies were listening, and ready to fling their awful answer to him if he as much as whispered to himself: “Would to God that George were not satisfied!”

  The sense of their haunting presence laid its clutch on him, and caused him, after a pause, to finish his phrase in another tone. “No; satisfied’s not the word; I’m glad George is out of it!” he exclaimed.

  Miss Anthony was folding away the letter as calmly as if it had been a refugee record. She did not appear to notice the change in Campton’s voice.

  “I don’t pretend to your sublime detachment: you’ve never had a child,” he sneered. (Certainly, if the Furies were listening, they would put that down to his credit!)

  “Oh, my poor John,” she said; then she locked the desk, took her hat from the lamp-chimney on which it had been hanging, jammed it down on her head like a helmet, and remarked: “We’ll go together, shall we? It’s time I got back to the office.”

  On the way downstairs both were silent. Campton’s ears echoed with his stupid taunt, and he glanced at her without daring to speak. On the last landing she paused and said: “I’ll see Julia this evening about George’s change of address. She may be worried; and I can explain—I can take her my letter.”

  “Oh, do” he assented. “And tell her—tell her—if she needs me”

  It was as much of a message as he found courage for. Miss Anthony nodded.

  

  XIX.

  One day Mme. Lebel said: “The first horse-chestnuts are in bloom. And monsieur must really buy himself some new shirts.”

  Campton looked at her in surprise. She spoke in a different voice; he wondered if she had had good news of her grandchildren. Then he saw that the furrows in her old face were as deep as ever, and that the change in her voice was simply an unconscious response to the general stirring of sap, the spring need to go on living, through everything and in spite of everything.

  On se fait une raison, as Mme. Lebel would have said. Life had to go on, and new shirts had to be bought. No one knew why it was necessary, but every one felt that it was; and here were the horse-chestnuts once more actively confirming it. Habit laid its compelling grasp on the wires of the poor broken marionettes with which the Furies had been playing, and they responded, though with feebler flappings, to the accustomed jerk.

  In Campton the stirring of the sap had been a cold and languid process, chiefly felt in his reluctance to go on with his relief work. He had tried to close his ears to the whispers of his own lassitude, vexed, after the first impulse of self-dedication, to find that no vocation declared itself, that his task became each day more tedious as well as more painful. Theoretically, the pain ought to have stimulated him: perpetual immersion in that sea of anguish should have quickened his effort to help the poor creatures sinking under its waves. The woe of the war had had that effect on Adele Anthony, on young Boylston, on Mile. Davril, on the greater number of his friends. But their ardour left him cold. He wanted to help, he wanted it, he was sure, as earnestly as they; but the longing was not an inspiration to him, and he felt more and more that to work listlessly was to work ineffectually.

  “I give the poor devils so many boots and money-orders a day; you give them yourself, and so does Boylston,” he complained to Miss Anthony; who murmured: Ah, Boylston” as if that point of the remark were alone worth noticing.

  “At his age too; it’s extraordinary, the way the boy’s got out of himself.”

  “Or into himself, rather. He was a pottering boy before—now he’s a man, with a man’s sense of things.”

  “Yes; but his patience, his way of getting into their minds, their prejudices, their meannesses, their miseries! He doesn’t seem to me like the kind who was meant to be a missionary.”

  “Not a bit of it… But he’s burnt up with shame at our not being in the war—as all the young Americans are.”

  Campton made an impatient movement. “Benny Upsher again!

  Can’t we let our government decide all that for us? What else did we elect it for, I wonder?”

  “I wonder,” echoed Miss Anthony.

  Talks of this kind were irritating and unprofitable, and Campton did not again raise the question. Miss Anthony’s vision was too simplifying to penetrate far into his doubts, and after nearly a year’s incessant contact with the most savage realities her mind still seemed at ease in its old formulas.

  Simplicity, after all, was the best safeguard in such hours. Mrs. Brant was as absorbed in her task as Adele Anthony. Since the Brant villa at Deauville had been turned into a hospital she was always on the road, in a refulgent new motor emblazoned with a Red Cross, carrying supplies, rushing down with great surgeons, hurrying back to committee meetings and conferences with the Service de Sante (for she and Mr. Brant were among the leaders in American relief work in Paris), and throwing open the Avenue Marigny drawing-rooms for concerts, lectures and such sober philanthropic gaieties as society was beginning to countenance.

  On the day when Mme. Lebel told Campton that the horse-chestnuts were in blossom and he must buy some new shirts he was particularly in need of such incentives. He had made up his mind to go to see Mrs. Brant about a concert for “The Friends of French Art” which was to be held in her house. Ever since George had asked him to see something of his mother Campton had used the pretext of charitable collaboration as the best way of getting over their fundamental lack of anything to say to each other.

  The appearance of the Champs Elysées confirmed Mme. Lebel’s announcement. Everywhere the punctual rosy spikes were rising above unfolding green; and Campton, looking up at them, remembered once thinking how Nature had adapted herself to the scene in overhanging with her own pink lamps and green fans the lamps and fans of the cafés chantants beneath. The latter lights had long since been extinguished, the fans folded up; and as he passed the bent and broken arches of electric light, the iron chairs and dead plants in paintless boxes, all heaped up like the scenery of a bankrupt theatre, he felt the pang of Nature’s obstinate renewal in a world of death. Yet he also felt the stir of the blossoming trees in the form of a more restless discontent, a duller despair, a new sense of inadequacy. How could war go on when spring had come?

  Mrs. Brant, having reduced her household and given over her drawing-rooms to charity, received in her boudoir, a small room contrived by a clever upholsterer to simulate a seclusion of which she have never felt the need. Photographs strewed the low tables; and facing the door Campton saw George’s last portrait, in uniform, enclosed in an expensive frame. Campton had received the same photograph, and thrust it into a drawer; he
thought a young man on a safe staff job rather ridiculous in uniform, and at the same time the sight filled him with a secret dread.

  Mrs. Brant was bidding good-bye to a lady in mourning whom Campton did not know. His approach through the carpeted antechamber had been unnoticed, and as he entered the room he heard Mrs. Brant say in French, apparently in reply to a remark of her visitor: “Bridge, chère Madame? No; not yet. I confess I haven’t the courage to take up my old life. We mothers with sons at the front.. .”

  “Ah,” exclaimed the other lady, “there I don’t agree with you. I think one owes it to them to go on as if one were as little afraid as they are. That is what all my sons prefer… Even,” she added, lowering her voice but lifting her head higher, “even, I’m sure, the one who is buried by the Marne.” With a flush on her handsome face she pressed Mrs. Brant’s hand and passed out.

  Mrs. Brant had caught sight of Campton as she received the rebuke. Her colour rose slightly, and she said with a smile: “So many women can’t get on without amusement.”

  “No,” he agreed. There was a pause, and then he asked: “Who was it?”

  “The Marquise de Tranlay—the widow.”

  “Where are the sons she spoke of?”

  “There are three left: one in the Chasseurs a Pied; the youngest, who volunteered at seventeen, in the artillery in the Argonne; the third, badly wounded, in hospital at Compiègne. And the eldest killed. I simply can’t understand…”

  “Why,” Campton interrupted, “did you speak as if George were at the front? Do you usually speak of him in that way?”

  Her silence and her deepening flush made him feel the unkindness of the question. “I didn’t mean … forgive me,” he said. “Only sometimes, when I see women like that I’m”

  “Well?” she questioned.

  He was silent in his turn, and she did not insist. They sat facing each other, each forgetting the purpose of their meeting. For the hundredth time he felt the uselessness of trying to carry out George’s filial injunction: between himself and George’s mother these months of fiery trial seemed to have loosed instead of tightened the links.

  He wandered back to Montmartre through the bereft and beautiful city. The light lay on it in wide silvery washes, harmonizing the grey stone, the pale foliage, and a sky piled with clouds which seemed to rebuild in translucid masses the monuments below. He caught himself once more viewing the details of the scene in the terms of his trade. River, pavements, terraces heavy with trees, the whole crowded sky-line from Notre Dame to the Pantheon, instead of presenting themselves in their bare reality, were transposed into a painter’s vision. And the faces around him became again the starting-point of rapid incessant combinations of line and colour, as if the visible world were once more at its old trick of weaving itself into magic designs.

  The reawakening of this instinct deepened Campton’s sense of unrest, and made him feel more than ever unfitted for a life in which such things were no longer of account, in which it seemed a disloyalty even to think of them.

  He returned to the studio, having promised to deal with some office work which he had carried home the night before. The papers lay on the table; but he turned to the window and looked out over his budding lilacs at the new strange Paris. He remembered that it was almost a year since he had leaned in the same place, gazing down on the wise and frivolous old city in her summer dishabille while he planned his journey to Africa with George; and something George had once quoted from Faust came drifting through his mind: “Take care! You’ve broken my beautiful world! There’ll be splinters…” Ah, yes, splinters, splinters … everybody’s hands were red with them! What retribution devised by man could be commensurate with the crime of destroying his beautiful world? Campton sat down to the task of collating office files.

  His bell rang, and he started up, as much surprised as if the simplest events had become unusual. It would be natural enough that Dastrey or Boylston should drop in—or even Adele Anthony—but his heart beat as if it might be George. He limped to the door, and found Mrs. Talkett.

  She said: “May I come in?” and did so without waiting for his answer. The rapidity of her entrance surprised him less than the change in her appearance. But for the one glimpse of her dishevelled elegance, when she had rushed into Mrs. Brant’s drawing-room on the day after war was declared, he had seen her only in a nursing uniform, as absorbed in her work as if it had been a long-thwarted vocation. Now she stood before him in raiment so delicately springlike that it seemed an emanation of the day. Care had dropped from her with her professional garb, and she smiled as though he must guess the reason.

  In ordinary times he would have thought: “She’s in love” but that explanation was one which seemed to belong to other days. It reminded him, however, how little he knew of Mrs. Talkett, who, after Rene Davril’s death, had vanished from his life as abruptly as she had entered it. Allusions to “the Talketts,” picked up now and again at Adele Anthony’s, led him to conjecture an invisible husband in the background; but all he knew of Mrs. Talkett was what she had told him of her “artistic” yearnings, and what he had been able to divine from her empty questioning eyes, from certain sweet inflections when she spoke of her wounded soldiers, and from the precise and finished language with which she clothed her unfinished and unprecise thoughts. All these indications made up an image not unlike that of the fashion-plate torn from its context of which she had reminded him at their first meeting; and he looked at her with indifference, wondering why she had come.

  With an abrupt gesture she pulled the pin from her heavily-plumed hat, tossed it on the divan, and said: “Dear Master, I just want to sit with you and have you talk to me.” She dropped down beside her hat, clasped her thin hands about her thin knee, and broke out, as if she had already forgotten that she wanted him to talk to her: “Do you know, I’ve made up my mind to begin to live again—to live my own life, I mean, to be my real me, after all these dreadful months of exile from myself. I see now that that is my real duty—just as it is yours, just as it is that of every artist and every creator. Don’t you feel as I do? Don’t you agree with me? We must save Beauty for the world; before it is too late we must save it out of this awful wreck and ruin. It sounds ridiculously presumptuous, doesn’t it, to say ‘we’ in talking of a great genius like you and a poor little speck of dust like me? But after all there is the same instinct in us, the same craving, the same desire to realize Beauty, though you do it so magnificently and so—so objectively, and I …” she paused, unclasped her hands, and lifted her lovely bewildered eyes, “I do it only by a ribbon in my hair, a flower in a vase, a way of looping a curtain, or placing a lacquer screen in the right light. But I oughtn’t to be ashamed of my limitations, do you think I ought? Surely every one ought to be helping to save Beauty; every one is needed, even the humblest and most ignorant of us, or else the world will be all death and ugliness. And after all, ugliness is the only real death, isn’t it?” She drew a deep breath and added: “It has done me good already to sit here and listen to you.”

  Campton, a few weeks previously, would have been amused, or perhaps merely irritated. But in the interval he had become aware in himself of the same irresistible craving to “live,” as she put it, and as he had heard it formulated, that very day, by the mourning mother who had so sharply rebuked Mrs. Brant. The spring was stirring them all in their different ways, secreting in them the sap which craved to burst into bridge-parties, or the painting of masterpieces, or a consciousness of the need for new shirts.

  “But what am I in all this?” Mrs. Talkett rushed on, sparing him the trouble of a reply. “Nothing but the match that lights the flame! Sometimes I imagine that I might put what I mean into poetry … I have scribbled a few things, you know … but that’s not what I was going to tell you. It’s you, dear Master, who must set us the example of getting back to our work, our real work, whatever it is. What have you done in all these dreadful months—the real You? Nothing! And the World will be the poorer for
it ever after. Master, you must paint again—you must begin today!”

  Campton gave an uneasy laugh. “Oh—paint!” He waved his hand toward the office files of “The Friends of French Art.” “There’s my work.”

  “Not the real you. It’s your dummy’s work—just as my nursing has been mine. Oh, one did one’s best—but all the while beauty and art and the eternal things were perishing! And what will the world be like without them?”

  “I shan’t be here,” Campton growled.

  “But your son will.” She looked at him profoundly. “You know I know your son—we’re friends. And I’m sure he would feel as I feel—he would tell you to go back to your painting.”

  For months past any allusion to George had put Campton on his guard, stiffening him with improvised defences. But this appeal of Mrs. Talkett’s found him unprepared, demoralized by the spring sweetness, and by his secret sense of his son’s connivance with it. What was war—any war—but an old European disease, an ancestral blood-madness seizing on the first pretext to slake its frenzy? Campton reminded himself again that he was the son of free institutions, of a country in no way responsible for the centuries of sinister diplomacy which had brought Europe to ruin, and was now trying to drag down America. George was right, the Brants were right, this young woman through whose lips Campton’s own secret instinct spoke was right.

  He was silent so long that she rose with the anxious frown that appeared to be her way of blushing, and faltered out: “I’m boring you—I’d better go.”

  She picked up her hat and held its cataract of feathers poised above her slanted head.

  “Wait—let me do you like that!” Campton cried. It had never before occurred to him that she was paintable; but as she stood there with uplifted arm the long line flowing from her wrist to her lip suddenly wound itself about him like a net.

  “Me?” she stammered, standing motionless, as if frightened by the excess of her triumph.