Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (16 page)

 
          
And
what was Campton, what had he ever been, but an artist? … A father; yes, he had
waked up to the practice of that other
art,
he was
learning to be a father. And now, at a stroke, his only two reasons for living
were gone: since the second of August he had had no portraits to paint, no son
to guide and to companion.

 
          
Other
people, he knew, had found jobs: most of his friends had been drawn into some
form of war-work. Dastrey, after vain attempts to enlist, thwarted by an
untimely sciatica, had found a post near the front, on the staff of a Red Cross
Ambulance. Adele Anthony was working eight or nine hours a day in a Depot which
distributed food and clothing to refugees from the invaded provinces; and Mrs.
Brant’s name figured on the committees of most of the newly-organized war
charities. Among Campton’s other friends many had accepted humbler tasks. Some
devoted their time to listing and packing hospital supplies, keeping accounts
in ambulance offices, sorting out refugees at the railway-stations, and telling
them where to go for food and help; still others spent their days, and
sometimes their nights, at the bitter-cold suburban sidings where the long
train-loads of wounded stopped on the way to the hospitals of the interior.
There was enough misery and confusion at the rear for every civilian volunteer
to find his task.

 
          
Among
them all, Campton could not see his place. His lameness put him at a
disadvantage, since taxicabs were few, and it was difficult for him to travel
in the crowded
métro
. He had no head
for figures, and would have thrown the best-kept accounts into confusion; he
could not climb steep stairs to seek out refugees, nor should he have known
what to say to them when he reached their attics. And so it would have been at
the railway canteens; he choked with rage and commiseration at all the
suffering about him, but found no word to cheer the sufferers.

 
          
Secretly,
too, he feared the demands that would be made on him if he once let himself be
drawn into the network of war charities. Tiresome women would come and beg for
money, or for pictures for bazaars: they were already getting up bazaars.

 
          
Money
he could not spare, since it was his duty to save it for George; and as for
pictures—why, there were a few sketches he might give, but here again he was
checked by his fear of establishing a precedent. He had seen in the papers that
the English painters were already giving blank canvases to be sold by auction
to millionaires in quest of a portrait. But that form of philanthropy would
lead to his having to paint all the unpaintable people who had been trying to
bribe a picture out of him since his sudden celebrity. No artist had a right to
cheapen his art in that way: it could only result in his turning out work that
would injure his reputation and reduce his sales after the war.

 
          
So
far, Campton had not been troubled by many appeals for help; but that was
probably because he had kept out of sight, and thrown into the fire the letters
of the few ladies who had begged a sketch for their sales, or his name for their
committees.

 
          
One
appeal, however, he had not been able to avoid. About two months earlier he had
had a visit from George’s friend Boylston, the youth he had met at Dastrey’s
dinner the night before war was declared. In the interval he had entirely forgotten
Boylston; but as soon as he saw the fat brown young man with a twinkle in his
eyes and his hair, Campton recalled him, and held out a cordial hand. Had not
George said the Boylston was the best fellow he knew?

 
          
Boylston
seemed much impressed by the honour of waiting on the great man. In spite of
his cool twinkling air he was evidently full of reverence for the things and
people he esteemed, and Campton’s welcome sent the blood up to the edge of his
tight curls. It also gave him courage to explain his visit.

 
          
He
had come to beg Campton to accept the chairmanship of the American Committee of
“The Friends of French Art,” an international group of painters who proposed to
raise funds for the families of mobilised artists. The American group would
naturally be the most active, since Americans had, in larger numbers than any
other foreigners, sought artistic training in France; and all the members
agreed that Campton’s name must figure at their head. But Campton was known to
be inaccessible, and the committee, aware that Boylston was a friend of
George’s, had asked him to transmit their request.

 
          
“You
see, sir, nobody else represents…”

 
          
Campton
thought as seldom as possible of what followed: he hated the part he had
played. But, after all, what else could he have done? Everything in him
recoiled from what acceptance would bring with it: publicity, committee
meetings, speechifying, writing letters, seeing troublesome visitors, hearing
harrowing stories, asking people for money-—above all, having to give his own;
a great deal of his own.

 
          
He
stood before the young man, abject, irresolute, chinking a bunch of keys in his
trouser-pocket, and remembering afterward that the chink must have sounded as
if it were full of money. He remembered too, oddly enough, that as his own
embarrassment increased Boylston’s vanished. It was as though the modest youth,
taking his host’s measure, had reluctantly found him wanting, and from that
moment had felt less in awe of his genius. Illogical, of course, and unfair—but
there it was.

 
          
The
talk had ended by Campton’s refusing the chairmanship, but agreeing to let his
name figure on the list of honorary members, where he hoped it would be
overshadowed by rival glories. And, having reached this conclusion, he had
limped to his desk, produced a handful of notes, and after a moment’s
hesitation held out two hundred francs with the stereotyped: “Sorry I can’t
make it more…”

 
          
He
had meant it to be two hundred and fifty; but, with his usual luck, all his
fumbling had failed to produce a fifty-franc note; and he could hardly ask
Boylston to “make the change.”

 
          
On
the threshold the young man paused to ask for the last news of George; and on
Campton’s assuring him that it was excellent, added, with evident sincerity:
“Still hung up on that beastly staff-job? I do call that hard luck” And now, of
all the unpleasant memories of the visit, that phrase kept the sharpest sting.

 
          
Was
it in fact hard luck? And did George himself think so? There was nothing in his
letters to show it. He seemed to have undergone no change of view as to his own
relation to the war; he had shown no desire to “be in it,” as that mad young
Upsher said.

 
          
For
the first time since he had seen George’s train pull out of the Gare de l’Est
Campton found himself wondering at the perfection of his son’s moral balance.
So many thing had happened since; war had turned out to be so immeasurably more
hideous and abominable than those who most abhorred war had dreamed it could
be; the issues at stake had become so glaringly plain, right and wrong, honour
and dishonour, humanity and savagery faced each other so squarely across the
trenches, that it seemed strange to Campton that his boy, so eager, so
impressionable, so quick on the uptake, should not have felt some such burst of
wrath as had driven even poor Jules Lebel into the conflict.

 
          
The
comparison, of course, was absurd. Lebel had been parted from his dearest, his
wife dragged to prison, his child virtually murdered: any man, in his place,
must have felt the blind impulse to kill. But what was Lebel’s private plight
but a symbol of the larger wrong? This war could no longer be compared to other
wars: Germany was conducting it on methods that civilization had made men
forget. The occupation of Luxembourg; the systematic destruction of Belgium;
the savage treatment of the people of the invaded regions; the outrages of
Louvain and Rheims and Ypres; the voice with which these offences cried to
heaven had waked the indignation of humanity. Yet George, in daily contact with
all this woe and ruin, seemed as unmoved as though he had been behind a desk in
the New York office of Bullard and Brant.

 
          
If
there were any change in his letters it was rather that they were more
indifferent. His reports of himself became drier, more stereotyped, his
comments on the situation fewer: he seemed to have been subdued to the hideous
business he worked in. It was true that his letters had never been expressive:
his individuality seemed to dry up in contact with pen and paper. It was true
also that letters from the front were severely censored, and that it would have
been foolish to put in them anything likely to prevent their delivery. But
George had managed to send several notes by hand, and these were as colourless
as the others; and so were his letters to his mother, which Mrs. Brant always
sent to Miss Anthony, who privately passed them on to Campton.

 
          
Besides,
there were other means of comparison. People with sons at the front were
beginning to hand about copies of their letters; a few passages, strangely
moving and beautiful, had found their way into the papers. George, God be
praised, was not at the front; but he was in the war zone, far nearer the
sights and sounds of death than his father, and he had comrades and friends in
the trenches. Strange that what he wrote was still so cold to the touch…

 
          
“It’s
the scientific mind, I suppose,” Campton reflected. “These youngsters are all
rather like beautifully made machines…” Yet it had never before struck him that
his son was like a beautifully made machine.

 
          
He
remembered that he had not dined, and got up wearily. As he passed out he
noticed on a pile of letters and papers a brand-new card: he could always tell
the new cards by their whiteness, which twenty-four hours of studio-dust turned
to grey.

 
          
Campton
held the card to the light. It was large and glossy, a beautiful thick pre-war
card; and on it was engraved:

 
          
harvey
mayhew
 
Délégué des Etats Unis au Congrès de la
Paix

 
          
with
a pen-stroke through the lower line. Beneath was
written an imperative “p.t.o.”; and reversing the card, Campton read, in an
agitated hand: “Must see you at once. Call up Nouveau Luxe”; and, lower down:
“Excuse ridiculous card. Impossible get others under six weeks.”

 
          
So
Mayhew had turned up! Well, it was a good thing: perhaps he might bring news of
that mad Benny Upsher whose doings had caused Campton so much trouble in the
early days that he could never recall the boy’s obstinate rosy face without a
stir of irritation.

 
          
“I
want to be in this thing” Well, young Upsher had apparently been in it with a
vengeance; but what he had cost Campton in cables to his distracted family, and
in weary pilgrimages to the War Office, the American Embassy, the Consulate,
the Prefecture of Police, and diverse other supposed sources of information,
the painter meant some day to tell his young relative in no measured terms.
That is, if the chance ever presented itself; for, since he had left the studio
that morning four months ago, Benny had so completely vanished that Campton
sometimes wondered, with a little shiver, if they were ever likely to exchange
words again in this world.

 
          
“Mayhew
will know; he wants to tell me about the boy, I suppose,” he mused.

 
          
Harvey
Mayhew—Harvey Mayhew with a pen-stroke through the title which, so short a time
since, it had been his chief ambition to display on his cards! No wonder it
embarrassed him now. But where on earth had he been all this time? As Campton
pondered on the card a memory flashed out.
Mayhew?
Mayhew?
Why, wasn’t it Mayhew who had waylaid him in the
Crillon a few hours before war was declared, to ask his advice about the safest
way of travelling to
the
Hague? And hadn’t he,
Campton, in all good faith, counselled him to go by Luxembourg “in order to be
out of the way of trouble”?

 
          
The
remembrance swept away the painter’s sombre thoughts, and he burst into a laugh
that woke the echoes of the studio.

 
          
 