Edith Wharton - Novel 14

by A Son at the Front (v2. 1)

  Campton’s eyes returned to his son. George was still with Mrs. Talkett, but they had only had time for a word or two before she was called away to seat an important dowager. In that moment, however, the father noted many things. George, as usual nowadays, kept his air of guarded kindliness, though the blue of his eyes grew deeper; but Mrs. Talkett seemed bathed in light. It was such a self-revelation that Campton’s curiosity was lost in the artist’s abstract joy. “If I could have painted her like that!” he thought, reminded of having caught Mme. de Dolmetsch transfigured by fear for her lover; but an instant later he remembered. “Poor little thing!” he murmured. Mrs. Talkett turned her head, as if his thought had reached her. “Oh, yes—oh, yes; come and let me tell you all about it,” her eyes entreated him. But Mayhew and Sir Cyril Jorgenstein were between them.

  “George!” Mrs. Brant called; and across the intervening groups Campton saw his son bowing to the Marquise de Tranlay.

  Mme. de Dolmetsch jumped up, her bracelets jangling like a prompter’s call. “Silence!” she cried. The ladies squeezed into their seats, the men resigned themselves to door-posts and window-embrasures, and the pianist attacked Stravinsky…

  “Dancing?” Campton heard his hostess answering some one. “N—no: not quite yet, I think. Though in London, already … oh, just for the officers on leave, of course. Poor darlings—why shouldn’t they? But today, you see, it’s for a charity.” Her smile appealed to her hearer to acknowledge the distinction.

  The music was over, and scanning the groups at the tea-tables, Campton saw Adele and Mile. Davril squeezed away in the remotest corner of the room. He took a chair at their table, and Boylston presently blinked his way to them through the crowd.

  They seemed, all four, more like unauthorized intruders on the brilliant scene than its laborious organizers. The entertainment, escaping from their control, had speedily reverted to its true purpose of feeding and amusing a crowd of bored and restless people; and the little group recognized the fact, and joked over it in their different ways. But Mile. Davril was happy at the sale of tickets, which must have been immense to judge from the crowd (spying about the entrance, she had seen furious fine ladies turn away ticketless); and Adele Anthony was exhilarated by the nearness of people she did not know, or wish to know, but with whose names and private histories she was minutely and passionately familiar.

  “That’s the old Duchesse de Murols with Mrs. Talkett—there, she’s put her at the Beausites’ table! Well, of all places! Ah, but you’re all too young to know about Beausite’s early history. And now, of course, it makes no earthly difference to anybody. But there must be times when Mme. Beausite remembers, and grins. Now that she’s begun to rouge again she looks twenty years younger than the Duchess.

  Ah,” she broke off, abruptly signing to Campton.

  He followed her glance to a table at which Julia Brant was seating herself with the Tranlay ladies and George. Mayhew joined them nobly deferential, and the elder ladies lent him their intensest attention, isolating George with the young girl.

  “H’m,” Adele murmured, “not such a bad thing! They say the girl will have half of old Montlhery’s money—he’s her mother’s uncle. And she’s heaps handsomer than the other—not that that seems to count any more!”

  Campton shrugged the subject away. Yes; it would be a good thing if George could be drawn from what his mother (with a retrospective pinching of the lips) called his “wretched infatuation.” But the idea that the boy might be coaxed into a marriage—and a rich marriage—by the Brants, was even more distasteful to Campton. If he really loved Madge Talkett better stick to her than let himself be cajoled away for such reasons.

  As the second part of the programme began, Campton and Boylston slipped out together. Campton was oppressed and disturbed. “It’s queer,” he said, taking Boylston’s arm to steer him through the dense darkness of the streets; “all these people who’ve forgotten the war have suddenly made me remember it.”

  Boylston laughed. “Yes, I know.” He seemed preoccupied and communicative, and the painter fancied he was going to lead the talk, as usual, to Preparedness and America’s intervention; but after a pause he said: ‘You haven’t been much at the office lately”

  “No,” Campton interrupted. “I’ve shirked abominably since George got back. But now that he’s gone to the Brants’ you’ll see”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it as a reproach, sir! How could you think it? We’re running smoothly enough, as far as organization goes. That’s not what bothers me”

  “You’re bothered?”

  Yes; he was—and so, he added, was Miss Anthony. The trouble was, he went on to explain, that Mr. Mayhew, after months of total indifference (except when asked to “represent” them on official platforms) had developed a disquieting interest in “The Friends of French Art.” He had brought them, in the beginning, a certain amount of money (none of which came out of his own pocket), and in consequence had been imprudently put on the Financial Committee, so that he had a voice in the disposal of funds, though till lately he had never made it heard. But now, apparently, “Atrocities” were losing their novelty, and he was disposed to transfer his whole attention to “The Friends of French Art,” with results which seemed incomprehensibly disturbing to Boylston, until he let drop the name of Mme. de Dolmetsch. Campton exclaimed at it.

  “Well—yes. You must have noticed that she and Mr. Mayhew have been getting pretty chummy. You see, he’s done such a lot of talking that people think he’s at least an Oil King; and Mme. de Dolmetsch is dazzled. But she’s got her musical prodigy to provide for” and Boylston outlined the situation which his astuteness had detected while it developed unperceived under Campton’s dreaming eyes. Mr. Mayhew was attending all their meetings now, finding fault, criticizing, asking to have the account investigated, though they had always been audited at regular intervals by expert accountants; and all this zeal originated in the desire to put Mme. de Dolmetsch in Miss Anthony’s place, on the plea that her greater social experience, her gift of attracting and interesting, would bring in immense sums of money—whereas, Boylston grimly hinted, they already had a large balance in the bank, and it was with an eye to that balance that Mme. de Dolmetsch was forcing Mayhew to press her claim.

  “You see, sir, Mr. Mayhew never turns out to be as liberal as they expect when they first hear him talk; and though Mme. de Dolmetsch has him in her noose she’s not getting what she wants—by a long way. And so they’ve cooked this up between them—she and Mme. Beausite—without his actually knowing what they’re after.”

  Campton stopped short, releasing Boylston’s arm. “But what you suggest is abominable,” he exclaimed.

  “Yes. I know it.” But the young man’s voice remained steady. “Well, I wish you’d come to our meetings, now you’re back.”

  “I will—I will! But I’m no earthly use on financial questions. You’re much stronger there.”

  He felt Boylston’s grin through the darkness. “Oh, they’ll have me out too before long.”

  ‘You? Nonsense! What do you mean?”

  “I mean that lots of people are beginning to speculate in war charities—oh, in all sorts of ways. Sometimes I’m sick to the point of chucking it all. But Miss Anthony keeps me going.”

  “Ah, she would!” Campton agreed.

  As he walked home his mind was burdened with Boylston’s warning. It was not merely the affair itself, but all it symbolized, that made his gorge rise, made him, as Boylston said, sick to the point of wanting to chuck it all—to chuck everything connected with this hideous world that was dancing and flirting and money-making on the great red mounds of dead. He grinned at the thought that he had once believed in the regenerative power of war—the salutary shock of great moral and social upheavals. Yet he had believed in it, and never more intensely than at George’s bedside at Doullens, in that air so cleansed by passion and pain that mere living seemed a meaningless gesture compared to the chosen surrender of life. But in the Paris to
which he had returned after barely four months of absence the instinct of self-preservation seemed to have wiped all meaning from such words. Poor fatuous Mayhew dancing to Mme. de Dolmetsch’s piping, Jorgenstein sinking under the weight of his international honours, Mme. de Tranlay intriguing to push her daughter in such society, and Julia placidly abetting her—Campton hardly knew from which of these sorry visions he turned with a completer loathing…

  There were still the others, to be sure, the huge obscure majority; out there in the night, the millions giving their lives for this handful of trivial puppets, and here in Paris, and everywhere, in every country, men and women toiling unweariedly to help and heal; but in Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room both fighters and toilers seemed to count as little in relation to the merry-makers as Miss Anthony and Mile. Davril in relation to the brilliant people who had crowded their table into the obscurest corner of the room.

  

  XXX.

  These thoughts continued to weigh on Campton; to shake them off he decided, with one of his habitual quick jerks of resolution, to get back to work. He knew that George would approve, and would perhaps be oftener with him if he had something interesting on his easel. Sir Cyril Jorgenstein had suggested that he would like to have his portrait finished—with the Legion of Honour added to his lapel, no doubt. And Harvey Mayhew, rosy and embarrassed, had dropped in to hint that, if Campton could find time to do a charcoal head—oh, just one of those brilliant sketches of his—of the young musical genius in whose career their friend Mme. de Dolmetsch was so much interested… But Campton had cut them both short. He was not working—he had no plans for the present. And in truth he had not thought even of attempting a portrait of George. The impulse had come to him, once, as he sat by the boy’s bed; but the face was too incomprehensible. He should have to learn and unlearn too many things first——

  At last, one day, it occurred to him to make a study of Mme. Lebel. He saw her in charcoal: her simple unquestioning anguish had turned her old face to sculpture. Campton set his canvas on the easel, and started to shout for her down the stairs; but as he opened the door he found himself face to face with Mrs. Talkett.

  “Oh,” she began at once, in her breathless way, “you’re here? The old woman downstairs wasn’t sure—and I couldn’t leave all this money with her, could I?”

  “Money? What money?” he echoed.

  She was very simply dressed, and a veil, drooping low from her hatbrim, gave to her over-eager face a shadowy youthful calm.

  “I may come in?” she questioned, almost timidly; and as Campton let her pass she added: “The money from the concert, of course—heaps and heaps of it! I’d no idea we’d made so much. And I wanted to give it to you myself.”

  She shook a bulging bag out of her immense muff, while Campton continued to stare at her.

  “I didn’t know you went out so early,” he finally stammered, trying to push a newspaper over the disordered remains of his breakfast.

  She lifted interrogative eye-brows. “That means that I’m in the way?”

  “No. But why did you bring that money here?”

  She looked surprised. “Why not? Aren’t you the head—the real head of the committee? And wasn’t the concert given in my house?” Her eyes rested on him with renewed timidity. “Is it—disagreeable to you to see me?” she asked.

  “Disagreeable? My dear child, no.” He paused, increasingly embarrassed. What did she expect him to say next? To thank her for having sent him the orderly’s letter? It seemed to him impossible to plunge into the subject uninvited. Surely it was for her to give him the opening, if she wished to.

  “Well, no!” she broke out. “I’ve never once pretended to you, have I? The money’s a pretext. I wanted to see you—here, alone, with no one to disturb us.”

  Campton felt a confused stirring of relief and fear. All his old dread of scenes, commotions, disturbing emergencies—of anything that should upset his perpetually vibrating balance—was blent with the passionate desire to hear what his visitor had to say.

  “You—it was good of you to think of sending us that letter,” he faltered.

  She frowned in her anxious way and looked away from him. “Afterward I was afraid you’d be angry.”

  “Angry? How could I?” He groped for a word. “Surprised—yes. I knew nothing … about you and . ..”

  “Not even that it was I who bought the sketch of him—the one that Leonce Black sold for you last year?”

  The blood rushed to Campton’s face. Suddenly he felt himself trapped and betrayed. “You—you? You’ve got that sketch?” The thought was somehow intolerable to him.

  “Ah, now you are angry,” Mrs. Talkett murmured.

  “No, no; but I never imagined”

  “I know. That was what frightened me—your suspecting nothing.” She glanced about her, dropped to a corner of the divan, and tossed off her hat with the old familiar gesture. “Oh, can I talk to you?” she pleaded.

  Campton nodded.

  “I wish you’d light your pipe, then, and sit down too.” He reached for his pipe, struck a match, and slowly seated himself. “You always smoke a pipe in the morning, don’t you? He told me that,” she went on; then she paused again and drew a long anxious breath. “Oh, he’s so changed! I feel as if I didn’t know him any longer—do you?”

  Campton looked at her with deepening wonder. This was more surprising than discovering her to be the possessor of the picture; he had not expected deep to call unto deep in their talk. “I’m not sure that I do,” he confessed.

  Her fidgeting eyes deepened and grew quieter. “Your saying so makes me feel less lonely,” she sighed, half to herself. “But has he told you nothing since he came back—really nothing?”

  “Nothing. After all—how could he? I mean, without indiscretion?”

  “Indiscretion? Oh” She shrugged the word away with half a smile, as though such considerations belonged to a prehistoric order of things. “Then he hasn’t even told you that he wants me to get a divorce?”

  “A divorce?” Campton exclaimed. He sat staring at her as if the weight of his gaze might pin her down, keep her from fluttering away and breaking up into luminous splinters. George wanted her to get a divorce—wanted, therefore, to marry her! His passion went as deep for her as that—too deep, Campton conjectured, for the poor little ephemeral creature, who struck him as wriggling on it like a butterfly impaled.

  “Please tell me,” he said at length; and suddenly, in short inconsequent sentences, the confession poured from her.

  George, it seemed, during the previous winter in New York, when they had seen so much of each other, had been deeply attracted, had wanted “everything,” and at once—and there had been moments of tension and estrangement, when she had been held back by scruples she confessed she no longer understood (inherited prejudices, she supposed), and when her reluctance must have made her appear to be trifling, whereas, really it was just that she couldn’t … couldn’t… So they had gone on for several months, with the usual emotional ups-and-downs, till he had left for Europe to join his father; and when they had parted she had given him the half-promise that if they met abroad during the summer she would perhaps … after all …

  Then came the war. George had been with her during those few last hours in Paris, and had dined with her and her husband (had Campton forgiven her?) the night before he was mobilised. And then, when he was gone, she had understood that only timidity, vanity, the phantom barriers of old terrors and traditions, had prevented her being to him all that he wanted…

  She broke off abruptly, put in a few conventional words about an ill-assorted marriage, and never having been “really understood,” and then, as if guessing that she was on the wrong tack, jumped up, walked to the other end of the studio, and turned back to Campton with the tears running down her ravaged face.

  “And now—and now—he says he won’t have me!” she lamented.

  “Won’t have you? But you tell me he wants you to be divor
ced.”

  She nodded, wiped away the tears, and in so doing stole an unconscious glance at the mirror above the divan. Then, seeing that the glance was detected, she burst into a sort of sobbing laugh. “My nose gets so dreadfully red when I cry,” she stammered.

  Campton took no notice, and she went on: “A divorce? Yes. And unless I do—unless I agree to marry him—we’re never to be anything but friends.”

  “That’s what he says?”

  “Yes. Oh, we’ve been all in and out of it a hundred times.”

  She pulled out a gold-mesh bag and furtively restored her complexion, as Mrs. Brant had once done in the same place.

  Campton sat still, considering. He had let his pipe go out. Nothing could have been farther from the revelation he had expected, and his own perplexity was hardly less great than his visitor’s. Certainly it was not the way in which young men had behaved in his day—nor, evidently, had it been George’s before the war.

  Finally, he made up his mind to put the question: “And Talkett?”

  She burst out at once: “Ah, that’s what I say—it’s not so simple!”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Breaking up—all one’s life.” She paused with a deepening embarrassment. “Of course Roger has made me utterly miserable—but then I know he really hasn’t meant to.”

  “Have you told George that?”

  ‘Yes. But he says we must first of all be above-board. He says he sees everything differently now. That’s what I mean when I say that I don’t understand him. He says love’s not the same kind of feeling to him that it was. There’s something of Meredith’s that he quotes—I wish I could remember it—something about a mortal lease.”

  “Good Lord,” Campton groaned, not so much at the hopelessness of the case as at the hopelessness of quoting Meredith to her. After a while he said abruptly: “You must forgive my asking: but things change sometimes—they change imperceptibly. Do you think he’s as much in love with you as ever?”