Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (42 page)

 
          
But
the Mayhew party was victorious too. How it came about a mind like Campton’s
could not grasp. Mr. Mayhew, it appeared, had let fall that a very large gift
of money from the world-renowned philanthropist, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein
(obtained through the good offices of Mmes. de Dolmetsch and Beausite) was
contingent on certain immediate changes in the organization (“drastic changes”
was Mr. Mayhew’s phrase); and thereupon several hitherto passive members had
suddenly found voice to assert the duty of not losing this gift. After that the
way was clear. Adele Anthony and Boylston were offered ornamental posts which
they declined, and within a week the Palais Royal saw them no more, and
Paris
drawing-rooms echoed with the usual rumours
of committee wrangles and dark discoveries.

 
          
The
episode left Campton with a bitter taste in his soul. It seemed to him like an
ugly little allegory of
Germany
’s manoeuvring the world into war. The
speciousness of Mr. Mayhew’s arguments, the sleight-of-hand by which he had
dislodged the real workers and replaced them by his satellites, reminded the
painter of the neutrals who were beginning to say that there were two sides to
every question, that war was always cruel, and how about the Russian atrocities
in Silesia? As the month dragged on a breath of luke-warmness had begun to blow
through the world, damping men’s souls, confusing plain issues, casting a doubt
on the worth of everything. People were beginning to ask what one knew, after
all, of the secret motives which had impelled half-a-dozen self-indulgent old
men ensconced in Ministerial offices to plunge the world in ruin. No one seemed
to feel any longer that life is something more than being alive; apparently the
only people not tired of the thought of death were the young men still pouring
out to it in their thousands.

 
          
Still
those thousands poured; still the young died; still, wherever Campton went, he
met elderly faces, known and unknown, disfigured by grief, shrunken with
renunciation. And still the months wore on without result.

 
          
One
day in crossing the Tuileries he felt the same soft sparkle which, just about a
year earlier, had abruptly stirred the sap in him. Yes—it was nearly a year
since the day when he had noticed the first horse-chestnut blossoms, and been
reminded by Mme. Lebel that he ought to buy some new shirts; and though today
the horse-chestnuts were still leafless they were already misty with buds, and
the tall white clouds above them full-uddered with spring showers. It was
spring again, spring with her deluding promises—her gilding of worn stones and
chilly water, the mystery of her distances, the finish and brilliance of her
nearer strokes. Campton, in spite of himself, drank down the life-giving
draught and felt its murmur in his veins. And just then, across the width of
the gardens he saw, beyond a stretch of turf and clipped shrubs, two people,
also motionless, who seemed to have the same cup at their lips. He recognized
his son and Mrs. Talkett.

 
          
Their
backs were toward him, and they stood close together, looking with the same
eyes at the same sight: an Apollo touched with flying sunlight. After a while
they walked on again, slowly and close to each other. George, as they moved,
seemed now and then to point out some beauty of sculpture, or the colour of a
lichened urn; and once they turned and took their fill of the great perspective
tapering to the Arch—the Arch on which Rude’s Maenad-Marseillaise still yelled
her battalions on to death.

 
          
  

 
          
Campton
finished his charcoal of Mme. Lebel; then attacked her in oils. Now that his
work at the Palais Royal was ended, painting was once more his only refuge.

 
          
Adele
Anthony had returned to her refugees; Boylston, pale and obstinate, toiled on
at Preparedness. But Campton found it impossible to take up any new form of
work; his philanthropic ardour was exhausted. He could only shut himself up,
for long solitary hours, in the empty and echoing temple of his art.

 
          
George
emphatically approved of his course: George was as insistent as Mrs. Brant on
the duty of “business as usual.” But on the young man’s lips the phrase had a
different meaning; it seemed the result of that altered perspective which
Campton was conscious of whenever, nowadays, he tried to see things as his son
saw them. George was not indifferent, he was not callous; but he seemed to feel
himself
mysteriously set apart, destined to some other
task for which he was passively waiting. Even the split among “The Friends of
French Art” left him, despite his admiration for Boylston, curiously
unperturbed. He seemed to have taken the measure of all such ephemeral
agitations, and to regard them with an indulgent pity which was worse than
coldness.

 
          
“He
feels that all we do is so useless,” Campton said to Dastrey; “he’s like a
gardener watching ants rebuild their hill in the middle of a path, and knowing
all the while that hill and path are going to be wiped out by his pick.”

 
          
“Ah,
they’re all like that,” Dastrey murmured.

 
          
Mme.
Lebel came up to the studio every afternoon. The charcoal study had been only
of her head; but for the painting Campton had seated her in her own horsehair
arm-chair, her smoky lamp
beside
her, her sewing in
her lap. More than ever he saw in the wise old face something typical of its
race and class: the obstinate French gift, as some one had put it, of making
one more effort after the last effort.

 
          
The
old woman could not imagine why he wanted to paint her; but when one day he
told her it was for her grandsons, her eyes filled, and she said: “For which
one, sir?
For they’re both at
Verdun
.”

 
          
One
autumn afternoon he was late in getting back to the studio, where he knew she
was waiting for him. He pushed the door open, and there, in the beaten-down
attitude in which he had once before seen her, she lay across the table, her
cap awry, her hands clutching her sewing, and George kneeling at her side. The
young man’s arm was about her, his head pressed against her breast; and on the
floor
lay
the letter, the fatal letter which was
always, nowadays, the key to such scenes.

 
          
Neither
George nor the old woman had heard Campton enter; and for a moment he stood and
watched them. George’s face, so fair and ruddy against Mme. Lebel’s rusty
black, wore a look of boyish compassion which Campton had never seen on it.
Mme. Lebel had sunk into his hold as if it soothed and hushed her; and Campton
said to himself: “These two are closer to each other than George and I, because
they’ve both seen the horror face to face. He knows what to say to her ever so
much better than he knows what to say to his mother or me.”

 
          
But
apparently there was no need to say much. George continued to kneel in silence;
presently he bent and kissed the old woman’s cheek; then he got to his feet and
saw his father.

 
          
“The
Chasseur Alpin,” he merely said, picking up the letter and handing it to
Campton. “It was the grandson she counted on most.”

 
          
Mme.
Lebel caught sight of Campton, smoothed herself and stood up also.

 
          
“I
had found him a wife—a strong healthy girl with a good dot. There go my last
great-grandchildren! For the other will be killed too. I don’t understand any
more, do you?” She made an automatic attempt to straighten the things on the
table, but her hands beat the air and George had to head her downstairs.

 
          
It
was that day that Campton said to himself: “We shan’t keep him in
Paris
much longer.” But the heavy weeks of spring
and summer passed, the inconclusive conflict at the front went on with its
daily toll of dead, and George still stuck to his job. Campton, during this
time, continued to avoid the Brants as much as possible. His wife’s
conversation was intolerable to him; her obtuse optimism, now that she had got
her son back, was even harder to bear than the guiltily averted glance of Mr. Brant,
between whom and Campton their last talk had hung a lasting shadow of
complicity.

 
          
But
most of all Campton dreaded to meet the Talketts; the wife with her flushed
cheek-bones and fixed eyes, the husband still affably and continuously arguing
against Philistinism. One afternoon the painter stumbled on them, taking tea
with George in Boylston’s little flat; but he went away again, unable to bear
the interminable discussion between Talkett and Boylston, and the pacifist’s
reiterated phrase: “To borrow one of my wife’s expressions”—while George, with
a closed brooding face, sat silent, laughing drily now and then.
What a different George from the one his father had found, in
silence also, kneeling beside Mme. Lebel!

 
          
Once
again Campton was vouchsafed a glimpse of that secret George. He had walked
back with his son after the funeral mass for young Lebel; and in the porter’s
lodge of the Avenue Marigny they found a soldier waiting—a young square-built
fellow, with a shock of straw-coloured hair above his sunburnt rural face.
Campton was turning from the door when George dashed past him, caught the young
man by both shoulders, and shouted his name. It was that of the orderly who had
carried him out of the firing-line and hunted him up the next day in the Doullens
hospital. Campton saw the look the two exchanged: it lasted only for the taking
of a breath; a moment later officer and soldier were laughing like boys, and
the orderly was being drawn forth to shake hands with Campton. But again the
glance was an illumination; it came straight from that far country, the Benny
Upsher country, which Campton so feared to see in his son’s eyes.

 
          
The
orderly had been visiting his family, fugitives from the invaded regions who
had taken shelter in one of Adele Anthony’s suburban colonies. He had obtained
permission to stop in
Paris
on his way back to the front; and for two joyful days he was lodged and
feasted in the Avenue Marigny. Boylston provided him with an evening at
Montmartre
, George and Mrs. Brant took him to the theatre
and the cinema, and on the last day of his leave Adele Anthony invited him to
tea with Campton, Mr. Brant and Boylston. Mr. Brant, as they left this
entertainment, hung back on the stairs to say in a whisper to Campton: “The
family are
provided for—amply. I’ve asked George to mention
the fact to the young man; but not until just as he’s starting.”

 
          
Campton
nodded. For George’s sake he was glad; yet he could not repress a twinge of his
dormant jealousy. Was it always to be Brant who thought first of the things to
make George happy—always Brant who would alone have the power to carry them
out?

 
          
“But
he can’t prevent that poor fellow’s getting killed tomorrow,” Campton thought
almost savagely, as the young soldier beamed forth from the taxi in which George
was hurrying him to the station.

 
          
It
was not many days afterward that George looked in at the studio early one
morning. Campton, over his breakfast, had been reading the communique. There
was heavy news from
Verdun
; from east to west the air was dark with calamity; but George’s face
had the look it had worn when he greeted his orderly.

 
          
“Dad,
I’m off,” he said; and sitting down at the table, he unceremoniously poured
himself some coffee into his father’s empty cup.

 
          
“The
battalion’s been ordered back. I leave to-night. Let’s lunch together somewhere
presently, shall we?”

 
          
His
eye was clear, his smile confident: a great weight seemed to have fallen from
him, and he looked like the little boy sitting up in bed with his Lavengro.
“After ten months of
Paris
” he added, stretching his arms over his head with a great yawn.

 
          
“Yes—the
routine” stammered Campton, not knowing what he said. Yet he was glad too; yes,
in his heart of hearts he knew he was glad; though, as always happened, his
emotion took him by the throat and silenced him. But it did not matter, for
George was talking.