“Damn what they recognize! It was they who brought him to Paris; they made him travel when he wasn’t fit; they killed him.”
“Well—supposing they did: judge how much more they must be suffering!”
“Let ’em suffer. He’s my son—my son. He isn’t Brant’s.”
“Miss Anthony thinks”
“And he’s not hers either, that I know of!”
Boylston seemed to hesitate. “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it, sir? You’ve had him; you have him still. Nobody can touch that fact, or take it from you. Every hour of his life was yours. But they’ve never had anything, those two others, Mr. Brant and Miss Anthony; nothing but a reflected light. And so every outward sign means more to them. I’m putting it badly, I know”
Campton held out his hand. “You don’t mean to, I suppose. But better not put it at all. Good night,” he said. And on the threshold he called out sardonically: “And who’s going to pay for a monument, I’d like to know?”
A monument—they wanted a monument! Wanted him to decide about it, plan it, perhaps design it—good Lord, he didn’t know! No doubt it all seemed simple enough to them: anything did, that money could buy… When he couldn’t yet bear to turn that last canvas out from the wall, or look into the old portfolio even… Suffering, suffering! What did they any of them know about suffering? Going over old photographs, comparing studies, recalling scenes and sayings, discussing with some sculptor or other the shape of George’s eyelids, the spring of his chest-muscles, the way his hair grew and his hands, moved—why, it was like digging him up again out of that peaceful corner of the Neuilly cemetery where at last he was resting, like dragging him back to the fret and the fever, and the senseless roar of the guns that still went on.
And then: as he’d said to Boylston, who was to pay for their monument? Even if the making of it had struck him as a way of getting nearer to his boy, instead of building up a marble wall between them—even if the idea had appealed to him, he hadn’t a penny to spare for such an undertaking. In the first place, he never intended to paint again for money; never intended to do anything but these gaunt and serious or round and babyish young American faces above their stiff military collard, and when their portraits were finished to put them away, locked up for his own pleasure; and what he had earned in the last years was to be partly for these young men—for their reading-rooms, clubs, recreation centres, whatever was likely to give them temporary rest and solace in the grim months to come; and partly for such of the protégés of “The Friends of French Art” as had been deprived of aid under the new management. Tales of private jealousy and petty retaliation came to Campton daily, now that Mme. Beausite administered the funds; Adele Anthony and Mile. Davril, bursting with the wrongs of their pensioners, were always appealing to him for help. And then, hidden behind these more or less valid reasons, the old instinctive dread of spending had reasserted itself, he couldn’t tell how or why, unless through some dim opposition to the Brants’ perpetual outpouring; their hospitals, their motors, their bribes, their orchids, and now their monument—their monument!
He sought refuge from it all with his soldiers, haunting for hours every day one of the newly-opened Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Clubs. Adele Anthony had already found a job there, and was making a success of it. She looked twenty years older since George was gone, but she stuck to her work with the same humorous pertinacity; and with her mingled heartiness and ceremony, her funny resuscitation of obsolete American slang, and her ability to answer all their most disconcerting questions about Paris and France (Montmartre included), she easily eclipsed the ministering angels who twanged the home-town chord and called them “boys.”
The young men appeared to return Campton’s liking; it was as if they had guessed that he needed them, and wanted to offer him their shy help. He was conscious of something rather protecting in their attitude, of his being to them a vague unidentified figure, merely “the old gentleman” who was friendly to them; but he didn’t mind. It was enough to sit and listen to their talk, to try and clear up a few of the countless puzzles which confronted them, to render them such fatherly services as he could, and in the interval to jot down notes of their faces—their inexhaustibly inspiring faces. Sometimes to talk with them was like being on the floor in George’s nursery, among the blocks and the tin soldiers; sometimes like walking with young archangels in a cool empty heaven; but wherever he was he always had the sense of being among his own, the sense he had never had since George’s death.
To think of them all as George’s brothers, to study out the secret likeness to him in their young dedicated faces: that was now his one passion, his sustaining task; it was at such times that his son came back and sat among them…
Gradually, as the weeks passed, the first of his new friends, officers and soldiers, were dispersed throughout the training camps, and new faces succeeded to those he had tried to fix on his canvas; an endless line of Benny Upshers, baby-Georges, schoolboy Boylstons, they seemed to be. Campton saw each one go with a fresh pang, knowing that every move brought them so much nearer to the front, that ever-ravening and inexorable front. They were always happy to be gone; and that only increased his pain. Now and then he attached himself more particularly to one of the young men, because of some look of the eyes or some turn of the mind like George’s; and then the parting became anguish.
One day a second lieutenant came to the studio to take leave. He had been an early recruit of Plattsburg, and his military training was so far advanced that he counted on being among the first officers sent to the fighting line. He was a fresh-coloured lad, with fair hair that stood up in a defiant crest.
“There are so few of us, and there’s so little time to lose; they can’t afford to be too particular,” he laughed.
It was just the sort of thing that George would have said, and the laugh was like an echo of George’s. At the sound Campton suddenly burst into tears, and was aware of his visitor’s looking at him with eyes of dismay and compassion.
“Oh, don’t, sir, don’t,” the young man pleaded, wringing the painter’s hand, and making what decent haste he could to get out of the studio.
Campton, left alone, turned once more to his easel. He sat down before a canvas on which he had blocked out a group of soldiers playing cards at their club; but after a stroke or two he threw aside his brush, and remained with his head bowed on his hands, a lonely tired old man.
He had kept a cheerful front at his son’s going; and now he could not say goodbye to one of these young fellow without crying. Well—it was because he had no one left of his own, he supposed. Loneliness like his took all a man’s strength from him…
The bell rang, but he did not move. It rang again; then the door was pushed timidly open, and Mrs. Talkett came in. He had not seen her since the day of George’s funeral, when he had fancied he detected her in a shrunken black-veiled figure hurrying past in the meaningless line of mourners.
In her usual abrupt fashion she began, without a greeting: “I’ve come to say goodbye; I’m going to America.”
He looked at her remotely, hardly hearing what she said. “To America?”
“Yes; to join my husband.”
He continued to consider her in silence, and she frowned in her perplexed and fretful way. “He’s at Plattsburg, you know.” Her eyes wandered unseeingly about the studio. “There’s nothing else to do, is there—now—here or anywhere? So I sail tomorrow; I mean to take a house somewhere near him. He’s not well, and he writes that he misses me. The life in camp is so unsuited to him——”
Campton still listened absently. “Oh, you’re right to go,” he agreed at length, supposing it was what she expected of him.
“Am I?” She half-smiled. “What’s right and what’s wrong? I don’t know any longer. I’m only trying to do what I suppose George would have wanted.” She stood uncertainly in front of Campton. “All I do know,” she cried, with a sharp break in her voice, “is that I’ve never in my life been happy enoug
h to be so unhappy!” And she threw herself down on the divan in a storm of desolate sobbing.
After he had comforted her as best he could, and she had gone away, Campton continued to wander up and down the studio forlornly. That cry of hers kept on echoing in his ears: “I’ve never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!” It associated itself suddenly with a phrase of Boylston’s that he had brushed away unheeding: “You’ve had your son—you have him still; but those others have never had anything.”
Yes; Campton saw now that it was true of poor Madge Talkett, as it was of Adele Anthony and Mr. Brant, and even in a measure of Julia. They had never—no, not even George’s mother—had anything, in the close inextricable sense in which Campton had had his son. And it was only now, in his own hour of destitution, that he understood how much greater the depth of their poverty had been. He recalled the frightened embarrassed look of the young lieutenant whom he had discountenanced by his tears; and he said to himself: “The only thing that helps is to be able to do things for people. I suppose that’s why Brant’s always trying—”
Julia too: it was strange that his thoughts should turn to her with such peculiar pity. It was not because the boy had been born of her body: Campton did not see her now, as he once had in a brief moment of compassion, as the young mother bending illumined above her baby. He saw her as an old empty-hearted woman, and asked himself how such an unmanageable monster as grief was to fill the room up of her absent son.
What did such people as Julia do with grief, he wondered, how did they make room for it in their lives, get up and lie down every day with its taste on their lips? Its elemental quality, that awful sense it communicated of a whirling earth, a crumbling Time, and all the cold stellar spaces yawning to receive us—these feelings which he was beginning to discern and to come to terms with in his own way (and with the sense that it would have been George’s way too), these feelings could never give their stern appeasement to Julia… Her religion? Yes, such as it was no doubt it would help, talking with the Rector would help; giving more time to her church-charities, her wounded soldiers, imagining that she was paying some kind of tax on her affliction. But the vacant evenings, at home, face to face with Brant! Campton had long since seen that the one thing which had held the two together was their shared love of George; and if Julia discovered, as she could hardly fail to do, how much more deeply Brant had loved her son than she had, and how much more inconsolably he mourned him, that would only increase her sense of isolation. And so, in sheer self-defence, she would gradually, stealthily, fill up the void with the old occupations, with bridge and visits and secret consultations at the dressmaker’s about the width of crape on her dresses; and all the while the object of life would be gone for her. Yes; he pitied Julia most of all.
But Mr. Brant too—perhaps in a different way it was he who suffered most. For the stellar spaces were not exactly Mr. Brant’s native climate, and yet voices would call to him from them, and he would not know…
There were moments when Campton looked about him with astonishment at the richness of his own denuded life; when George was in the sunset, in the voices of young people, or in any trivial joke that father and son would have shared; and other moments when he was nowhere, utterly lost, extinct and irrecoverable; and others again when the one thing which could have vitalized the dead business of living would have been to see him shove open the studio door, stalk in, pour out some coffee for himself in his father’s cup, and diffuse through the air the warm sense of his bodily presence, the fresh smell of his clothes and his flesh and his hair. But through all these moods, Campton began to see, there ran the life-giving power of a reality embraced and accepted. George had been; George was; as long as his father’s consciousness lasted, George would be as much a part of it as the closest, most actual of his immediate sensations. He had missed nothing of George, and here was his harvest, his golden harvest.
Such states of mind were not constant with Campton; but more and more often, when they came, they swept him on eagle wings over the next desert to the next oasis; and so, gradually, the meaningless days became linked to each other in some kind of intelligible sequence.
Boylston, after the talk which had so agitated Campton, did not turn up again at the studio for some time; but when he next appeared the painter, hardly pausing to greet him, began at once, as if they had just parted: “That monument you spoke about the other day … you know…”
Boylston glanced at him in surprise.
“If they want me to do it, I’ll do it,” Campton went on, jerking the words out abruptly and walking away toward the window. He had not known, till he began, that he had meant to utter them, or how difficult they would be to say; and he stood there a moment struggling with the unreasoning rebellious irritability which so often lay in wait for his better impulses. At length he turned back, his hands in his pockets, clinking his change as he had done the first time that Boylston had come to him for help. “But as I plan the thing,” he began again, in a queer growling tone, “it’s going to cost a lot—everything of the sort does nowadays, especially in marble. It’s hard enough to get any one to that kind of work at all. And prices have about tripled, you know.”
Boylston’s eyes filled, and he nodded, still without speaking.
“That’s just what Brant’ll like though, isn’t it?” Campton said, with an irrepressible sneer in his voice. He saw Boylston redden and look away, and he too flushed to the forehead and broke off ashamed. Suddenly he had the vision of Mr. Brant effacing himself at the foot of the hospital-stairs when they had arrived at Doullens; Mr. Brant drawing forth the copy of the orderly’s letter in the dark fog-swept cloister; Mr. Brant always yielding, always holding back, yet always remembering to do or to say the one thing the father’s lacerated soul could bear.
“And he’s had nothing—nothing—nothing!” Campton thought.
He turned again to Boylston, his face still flushed, his lips twitching. “Tell them—tell Brant—that i’ll design the thing; i’ll design it, aad he shall pay for it. He’ll want to—I understand that. Only, for God’s sake, don’t let him come here and thank me—at least not for a long time!”
Boylston again nodded silently, and turned to go.
After he had gone the painter moved back to his long table. He had always had a fancy for modelling—had always had lumps of clay lying about within reach. He pulled out all the sketches of his son from the old portfolio, spread them before him on the table, and began.
paris, 1918—Saint Brice-sous-Foret, 1922
The End
Edith Wharton - Novel 14 Page 30