Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (15 page)

 
          
Campton
saw before him the honest
bourgeois
dining-room, so strangely out of keeping with the rest of the establishment; he
saw the late August sun slanting in on the group about the table, on the
ambitious and unscrupulous great man, the two quiet women hidden under his
illustrious roof, and the youth who had held together these three dissimilar
people, making an invisible home in the heart of all that publicity. Campton
remembered his brief exchange of words with Fortin on the threshold, and the
father’s uncontrollable outburst: “For his mother and
myself
it’s not a trifle—having our only son in the war.”

 
          
Campton
shut his eyes and leaned back, sick with the memory. This man had had a share
in saving George; but his own son he could not save.

 
          
“What’s
the matter?” Miss Anthony
asked,
her hand on his arm.

 
          
Campton
could not bring the name to his lips.
“Nothing—nothing.
Only this room’s rather hot—and I must be off anyhow.” He got up, escaping from
her solicitude, and made his way out. He must go at once to Fortin’s for news.
The physician was still at Châlons; but there would surely be some one at the
house, and Campton could at least leave a message and ask where to write.

 
          
Dusk
had fallen. His eyes usually feasted on the beauty of the new Paris, the secret
mysterious Paris of veiled lights and deserted streets; but to-night he was
blind to it. He could see nothing but Fortin’s face, hear nothing but his voice
when he said: “Our only son in the war.”

 
          
He
groped along the pitch-black street for the remembered outline of the house
(since no house-numbers were visible), and rang several times without result.
He was just turning away when a big mud-splashed motor drove up. He noticed a
soldier at the steering-wheel, then three people got out stiffly: two women
smothered in crape and a haggard man in a dirty uniform. Campton stopped, and
Fortin-Lescluze recognized him by the light of the motor-lamp. The four stood
and looked at each other. The old mother, under her crape, appeared no bigger
than a child.

 
          
“Ah—you
know?” the doctor said. Campton nodded.

 
          
The
father spoke in a firm voice. “It happened three days ago—at Suippes. You’ve
seen his citation? They brought him in to me at Châlons without a warning—and
too late. I took off both legs, but gangrene had set in. Ah—if I could have got
hold of one of our big surgeons… Yes, we’re just back from the funeral… My
mother and my wife … they had that comfort. .

 
          
The
two women stood beside him like shrouded statues. Suddenly Mme. Fortin’s deep
voice came through the crape: “You saw him, Monsieur, that last day … the day
you came about your own son, I think?”

 
          
“I…
yes …” Campton stammered in anguish.

 
          
The
physician intervened. “And, now,
ma bonne
mère
, you’re not to be kept standing. You’re to go straight in and take
your tisane and go to bed.” He kissed his mother and pushed her into his wife’s
arms. “Good-bye, my dear. Take care of her.”

 
          
The
women vanished under the porte-cochere, and Fortin turned to the painter.

 
          
“Thank
you for coming. I can’t ask you in—I must go back immediately.”

 
          
“Back?”

 
          
“To my work.
Thank God. If it were not for that”

 
          
He
jumped into the motor, called out “En route,” and was absorbed into the night.

 
          
  

 
          
Campton
went home to his studio.

 
          
He
still lived there, shiftlessly and uncomfortably—for Mariette had never come
back from Lille. She had not come back, and there was no news of her. Lille had
become a part of the “occupied provinces,” from which there was no escape; and
people were beginning to find out what that living burial meant.

 
          
Adele
Anthony had urged Campton to go back to the hotel, but he obstinately refused.
What business had he to be living in expensive hotels when, for the Lord knew
how long, his means of earning a livelihood were gone, and when it was his duty
to save up for George—George, who was safe, who was definitely out of danger,
and whom he longed more than ever, when the war was over, to withdraw from the
stifling atmosphere of his stepfather’s millions?

 
          
He
had been so near to having the boy to himself when the war broke out! He had
almost had in sight the proud day when he should be able to say: “Look here:
this is your own bank-account. Now you’re independent—for God’s sake stop and
consider what you want to do with your life.”

 
          
The
war had put an end to that—but only for a time. If victory came before long,
Campton’s reputation would survive the eclipse, his chances of money-making
would be as great as ever, and the new George, the George matured and
disciplined by war, would come back with a finer sense of values, and a soul
steeled against the vulgar opportunities of wealth.

 
          
Meanwhile,
it behoved his father to save every penny. And the simplest way of saving was
to go on camping in the studio, taking his meals at the nearest wine-shop, and
entrusting his bed-making and dusting to old Mme. Lebel. In that way he could
live for a long time without appreciably reducing his savings.

 
          
Mme.
Lebel’s daughter-in-law, Mme. Jules, who was in the Ardennes with the little
girl when the war broke out, was to have replaced Mariette. But, like Mariette,
Mme. Jules never arrived, and no word came from her or the child. They too were
in an occupied province. So Campton jogged on without a servant. It was very
uncomfortable, even for his lax standards; but the dread of letting a stranger
loose in the studio made him prefer to put up with Mme. Lebel’s intermittent
services.

 
          
So
far she had borne up bravely. Her orphan grandsons were all at the front (how
that word had insinuated itself into the language!) but she continued to have
fairly frequent reassuring news of them. The Chasseur Alpin, slightly wounded
in Alsace, was safe in hospital; and the others were well, and wrote
cheerfully. Her son Jules, the cabinetmaker, was guarding a bridge at St.
Cloud, and came in regularly to see her; but Campton noticed that it was about
him that she seemed most anxious.

 
          
He
was a silent industrious man, who had worked hard to support his orphaned
nephews and his mother, and had married in middle age, only four or five years
before the war, when the lads could shift for themselves, and his own situation
was secure enough to permit the luxury of a wife and baby.

 
          
Mme.
Jules had waited patiently for him, though she had other chances; and finally
they had married and the baby had been born, and blossomed into one of those
finished little Frenchwomen who, at four or five, seem already to be musing on the
great central problems of love and thrift. The parents used to bring the child
to see Campton, and he had made a celebrated sketch of her, in her Sunday
bonnet, with little earrings and a wise smile. And these two, mother and child,
had disappeared on the second of August as completely as if the earth had
opened and swallowed them.

 
          
As
Campton entered he glanced at the old woman’s den, saw that it was empty, and
said to himself: “She’s at St. Cloud again.”
For he knew that
she seized every chance of being with her eldest.

 
          
He
unlocked his door and felt his way into the dark studio. Mme. Lebel might at
least have made up the fire! Campton lit the lamp, found some wood, and knelt
down stiffly by the stove. Really, life was getting too uncomfortable…

 
          
He
was trying to coax a flame when the door opened and he heard Mme. Lebel.

 
          
“Really,
you know” he turned to rebuke her; but the words died on his lips. She stood
before him, taking no notice; then her shapeless black figure doubled up, and
she sank down into his own armchair. Mme. Lebel, who, even when he offered her
a seat, never did more than rest respectful knuckles on its back!

 
          
“What’s
the matter? What’s wrong?” he exclaimed.

 
          
She
lifted her aged face. “Monsieur, I came about your fire; but I am too unhappy.
I have more than I can bear.” She fumbled vainly for a handkerchief, and wiped
away her tears with the back of her old laborious hand.

 
          
“Jules
has enlisted, Monsieur; enlisted in the infantry. He has left for the front
without telling me.”

 
          
“Good
Lord. Enlisted? At his age—is he crazy?”

 
          
“No,
Monsieur. But the little girl—he’s had news”

 
          
She
waited to steady her voice, and then fishing in another slit of her multiple
skirts, pulled out a letter. “I got that at midday. I hurried to St. Cloud—but
he left yesterday.”

 
          
The
letter was grim reading. The poor father had accidentally run across an escaped
prisoner who had regained the French lines near the village where Mme. Jules
and the child were staying. The man, who knew the wife’s family, had been
charged by them with a message to the effect that Mme. Jules, who was a proud
woman, had got into trouble with the authorities, and been sent off to a German
prison on the charge of spying. The poor little girl had cried and clung to her
mother, and had been so savagely pushed aside by the officer who made the
arrest that she had fallen on the stone steps of the “Kommandantur” and
fractured her skull. The fugitive reported her as still alive, but unconscious,
and dying.

 
          
Jules
Lebel had received this news the previous day; and within twenty-four hours he
was at the front. Guard a bridge at St. Cloud after that? All he asked was to
kill and be killed. He knew the name and the regiment of the officer who had
denounced his wife. “If I live long enough I shall run the swine down,” he
wrote. “If not, I’ll kill as many of his kind as God lets me.”

 
          
Mme.
Lebel sat silent, her head bowed on her hands; and Campton stood and watched
her. Presently she got up, passed the back of her hand across her eyes, and
said: “The room is cold. I’ll fetch some coal.”

 
          
Campton
protested. “No, no, Mme Lebel. Don’t worry about me.

 
          
Make
yourself something warm to drink, and try to sleep”

 
          
“Oh,
Monsieur, thank God for the work! If it were not for that” she said, in the
same words as the physician.

 
          
She
hobbled away, and presently he heard her bumping up again with the coal.

 
          
When
his fire was started, and the curtains
drawn,
and she
had left him, the painter sat down and looked about the studio. Bare and untidy
as it was, he did not find the sight unpleasant: he was used to it, and being
used to things seemed to him the first requisite of comfort. But to-night his
thoughts were elsewhere: he saw neither the tattered tapestries with their huge
heroes and kings, nor the blotched walls hung with pictures, nor the canvases
stacked against the chair-legs, nor the long littered table at which he wrote
and ate and mixed his colours. At one moment he was with Fortin-Lescluze,
speeding through the night toward fresh scenes of death; at another, in the
loge downstairs, where Mme. Lebel, her day’s work done, would no doubt
sid
down as usual by her smoky lamp and go on with her
sewing. “Thank God for the work” they had both said.

 
          
And
here Campton sat with idle hands, and did nothing
It
was not exactly his fault. What was there for a portrait-painter to do? He was
not a portrait-painter only, and on his brief trip to Châlons some of the
scenes by the way—gaunt unshorn faces of territorials at railway bridges,
soldiers grouped about a provision-lorry, a mud-splashed company returning to
the rear, a long grey train of “seventy-fives” ploughing forward through the
rain—at these sights the old graphic instinct had stirred in him. But the
approaches of the front were sternly forbidden to civilians, and especially to
neutrals (Campton was beginning to wince at the word); he himself, who had been
taken to Châlons by a high official of the Army Medical Board, had been given
only time enough for his interview with Fortin, and brought back to Paris the same
night. If ever there came a time for art to interpret the war, as Raffet, for
instance, had interpreted Napoleon’s campaigns, the day was not yet; the world
in which men lived at present was one in which the word “art” had lost its
meaning.