Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (26 page)

 
          
“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.

 
          
“Do
you mind?” he queried; and hardly hearing her faltered-out: “Mind? When it was
what I came for!” he dragged forth an easel, flung on it the first canvas he
could lay hands on (though he knew it was the wrong shape and size), and found
himself instantly transported into the lost world which was the only real one.

 
          
  

 
          
For
a month Campton painted on in transcendent bliss. His first stroke carried him
out of space and time, into a region where all that had become numbed and
atrophied in him could expand and breathe. Lines, images, colours were again
the sole facts: he plunged into their whirling circles like a stranded
sea-creature into the sea. Once more every face was not a vague hieroglyph, a
curtain drawn before an invisible aggregate of wants and woes, but a work of
art, a flower in a pattern, to be dealt with on its own merits, like a bronze
or a jewel. During the first day or two his hand halted; but the sense of
insufficiency was a goad, and he fought with his subject till he felt a strange
ease in every renovated muscle, and his model became like a musical instrument
on which he played with careless mastery.

 
          
He
had transferred his easel to Mrs. Talkett’s apartment. It was an odd patchwork
place, full of bold beginnings and doubtful pauses, rash surrenders to the
newest fashions and abrupt insurrections against them, where Louis-Philippe
mahogany had entrenched itself against the aggression of art nouveau hangings,
and the frail grace of eighteenth-century armchairs shed derision on lumpy
modern furniture painted like hobby-horses at a fair. It amused Campton to do
Mrs. Talkett against such a background: her thin personality needed to be
filled out by the visible results of its many quests and cravings. There were
people one could sit down before a blank wall, and all their world was there,
in the curves of their faces and the way their hands lay in their laps; others,
like Mrs. Talkett, seemed to be made out of the reflection of what surrounded
them, as if they had been born of a tricky grouping of looking-glasses, and
would vanish if it were changed.