Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (43 page)

 
          
“I
shall have
leave
a good deal oftener nowadays,” he
said with animation. “And everything is ever so much better organized—letters
and all that. I shan’t seem so awfully far away. You’ll see.”

 
          
Campton
still gazed at him struggling for expression. Their hands met. Campton said—or
imagined he said: “I see—I do see, already” though afterward he was not even
sure that he had spoken.

 
          
What
he saw, with an almost blinding distinctness, was the extent to which his own
feeling, during the long months, had imperceptibly changed, and how his inmost
impulse, now that the blow had fallen, was not of resistance to it, but of
acquiescence, since it made him once more one with his son.

 
          
He
would have liked to tell that to George; but speech was impossible. And
perhaps, after all, it didn’t matter; it didn’t matter, because George
understood. Their hand-clasp had made that clear, and an hour or two later they
were lunching together almost gaily.

 
          
Boylston
joined them and the three went on together to say goodbye to Adele Anthony.
Adele, for once, was unprepared: it was almost a relief to Campton, who winced
in advance at the thought her warlike attitude. The poor thing was far from
warlike: her pale eyes clung to George’s in a frightened stare, while her lips,
a little stiffly, repeated the stock phrases of good cheer. “Such a relief … I
congratulate you … getting out of all this paperasserie and red-tape… If I’d
been you I couldn’t have stood
Paris
another minute… The only hopeful people
left are at the front…” It was the formula that sped every departing soldier.

 
          
The
day wore on. To Campton its hours seemed as interminable yet as rapid as those
before his son’s first departure, nearly two years earlier. George had begged
his father to come in the evening to the Avenue Marigny, where he was dining
with the Brants. It was easier for Campton nowadays to fall in with such
requests: during the months of George’s sojourn in
Paris
a good many angles had had their edges
rubbed off.

 
          
Besides,
at that moment he would have done anything for his son—his son again at last!
In their hand-clasp that morning the old George had come back to him, simple,
boyish, just as he used to be; and Campton’s dread of the future was lightened
by a great glow of pride.

 
          
In
the Avenue Marigny dining-room the Brants and George were still sitting
together about the delicate silver and porcelain. There were no flowers: Julia,
always correct, had long since banished them as a superfluity. But there was
champagne for George’s farewell, and a glimpse of rich fare being removed.

 
          
Mr.
Brant rose to greet Campton. His concise features were drawn with
anxiety,
and with the effort to hide it; but his wife
appeared to Campton curiously unperturbed, and the leave-taking was less
painful and uselessly drawn out than he had expected.

 
          
George
and his father were to be sent to the station in Mr. Brant’s motor. Campton, as
he got in, remembered with a shiver the grey morning, before daylight, when the
same motor had stood at the studio door, waiting to carry him to Doullens;
between himself and his son he seemed to see Mr. Brant’s small suffering
profile.

 
          
To
shake off the memory he said: “Your mother’s in wonderfully good form. I was
glad to see she wasn’t nervous.”

 
          
George
laughed. “No. Madge met her this morning at the new clairvoyante’s.—It does
them all a lot of good,” he added, with his all-embracing tolerance.

 
          
Campton
shivered again. That universal smiling comprehension of George’s always made
him seem remoter than ever. “It makes him seem so old—a thousand years older
than I am.” But he forced an acquiescent laugh, and presently George went on:
“About Madge—you’ll be awfully good to her, won’t you, if I get smashed?”

 
          
“My dear boy!”

 
          
There
was another pause, and then Campton risked a question. “Just how do things
stand? I know so little, after all.”

 
          
For
a moment George seemed to hesitate: his thick fair eyebrows were drawn into a
puzzled frown. “I know—I’ve never explained it to you properly. I’ve tried to;
but I was never sure that I could make you see.” He paused and added quietly:
“I know now that she’ll never divorce Talkett.”

 
          
“You
know—?” Campton exclaimed with a great surge of relief.

 
          
“She
thinks she will; but I see that the idea still frightens her. And I’ve kept on
using the divorce argument only as a pretext.”

 
          
The
words thrust Campton back into new depths of perplexity. “A pretext?” he
echoed.

 
          
“My
dear old Dad—don’t you guess? She’s come to care for me awfully; if we’d gone
all the lengths she wanted, and then I’d got killed, there would have been
nothing on earth left for her. I hadn’t the right, don’t you see? We chaps
haven’t any futures to dispose of till this job we’re in is finished. Of
course, if I come back, and she can make up her mind to break with everything
she’s used to, we shall marry; but if things go wrong I’d rather leave her as
she is, safe in her little old rut. So many people can’t live out of one—and
she’s one of them, poor child, though she’s so positive she isn’t.”

 
          
Campton
sat chilled and speechless as the motor whirled them on through the hushed
streets. It paralyzed his faculties to think that in a moment more they would
be at the station.

 
          
“It’s
awfully fine: your idea,” he stammered at length.
“Awfully—magnanimous.”
But he still felt the chill down his spine.

 
          
“Oh,
it’s only that things look to us so different—so indescribably different—and
always will, I suppose, even after this business is over. We seem to be sealed
to it for life.”

 
          
“Poor girl—poor girl!”
Campton thought within himself. Aloud
he said: “My dear chap, of course you can count on my being—my doing”

 
          
“Of course, of course, old Dad.”

 
          
They
were at the station. Father and son got out and walked toward the train.
Campton put both hands on George’s shoulders.

 
          
“Look
here,” George broke out, “there’s one thing more. I want to tell you that I
know what a lot I owe to you and Adele. You’ve both been awfully fine: did you
know it? You two first made me feel a lot of things I hadn’t felt before. And
you know this is my job; I’ve never been surer of it than at this minute.”

 
          
They
clasped hands in silence, each looking his fill of the other; then the crowd
closed in, George exclaimed: “My kit-bag!” and somehow, in the confusion, the parting
was over, and Campton, straining blurred eyes, saw his son’s smile—the smile of
the light-hearted lad of old days—flash out at him from the moving train. For
an instant the father had the illusion that it was the goodbye look of the boy
George, going back to school after the holidays.

 
          
Campton,
as he came out of the station, stumbled, to his surprise, on Mr. Brant. The
little man, as they met, flushed and paled, and sought the customary support
from his eye-glasses.

 
          
“I
followed you in the other motor,” he said, looking away.

 
          
“Oh,
I say” Campton murmured; then, with an effort: “Shouldn’t you like me to drive
back with you?”

 
          
Mr.
Brant shook his head. “Thank you. Thank you very much. But it’s late and you’ll
want to be getting home. I’ll be glad if you’ll use my car.” Together they
strolled slowly across the station court to the place where the private motors
waited; but there Campton held out his hand.

 
          
“Much
obliged; I think I’ll walk.”

 
          
Mr.
Brant nodded; then he said abruptly: “This clairvoyante business: is there
anything to it, do you think? You saw how calm—er—Julia was just now: she
wished me to tell you that Spanish woman she goes to—her name is Olida, I
think—had absolutely reassured her about … about the future. The woman says she
knows that George will come back soon, and never be sent to the front again.
Those were the exact words, I believe. Never be sent to the front again. Julia
put every kind of question, and couldn’t trip her up; she wanted me to tell you
so. It does sound …? Well, at any rate, it’s a help to the mothers.”

 
          
  

 
          
The
next morning Campton said to himself: “I can catch that goodbye look if I get
it down at once” and pulled out a canvas before Mme. Lebel came in with his
coffee.

 
          
As
sometimes happened to him, the violent emotions of the last twenty-four hours
had almost immediately been clarified and transmuted into vision. He felt that
he could think contentedly of George if he could sit down at once and paint
him.

 
          
The
picture grew under his feverish fingers—feverish, yet how firm! He always
wondered anew at the way in which, at such hours, the inner flame and smoke
issued in a clear guiding radiance. He saw—he saw; and the mere act of his
seeing seemed to hold George safe in some pure impenetrable medium. His boy was
there, sitting to him, the old George he knew and understood, essentially,
vividly face to face with him.

 
          
He
was interrupted by a ring. Mme. Lebel, tray in hand, opened the door, and a
swathed and voluminous figure, sweeping in on a wave of musk, blotted her out.
Campton, exasperated at the interruption, turned to face Mme. Olida.

 
          
So
remote were his thoughts that he would hardly have recognized her had she not
breathed, on the old familiar guttural: “Juanito!”

 
          
He
was less surprised at her intrusion than annoyed at being torn from his
picture. “Didn’t you see a sign on the door? ‘No admission before twelve’” he
growled.

 
          
“Oh,
yes,” she said; “that’s how I knew you were in.”

 
          
“But
I’m not in; I’m working. I can’t allow”

 
          
Her
large bosom rose. “I
know,
my heart! I remember how
stern you always were.
‘Work—work—my work!’
It was
always that, even in the first days. But I come to you on my knees: Juanito,
imagine me there!” She sketched a plunging motion of her vast body, arrested it
in time by supporting herself on the table, and threw back her head
entreatingly, so that Campton caught a glint of the pearls in a crevasse of her
quaking throat. He saw that her eyes were red with weeping.

 
          
“What
can I do? You’re in trouble?”

 
          
“Oh,
such trouble, my heart—such trouble!” She leaned to him, absorbing his hands in
her plump muscular grasp. “I must have news of my son; I must! The young
man—you saw him that day you came with your wife? Yes—he looked in at the door:
beautiful as a god, was he not? That was my son Pepito!” And with a deep breath
of pride and anguish she unburdened herself of her tale.

 
          
Two
or three years after her parting with Campton she had married a clever French
barber from the Pyrénées. He had brought her to France, and they had opened a
“Beauty Shop” at Biarritz and had prospered. Pepito was born there and soon
afterward, alas, her clever husband, declaring that he “hated grease in cooking
or in woman” (“and after my Pepito’s birth I became as you now see me”), had
gone off with the manicure and all their savings. Mme. Olida had had a struggle
to bring up her boy; but she had kept on with the Beauty Shop, had made a
success of it, and not long before the war had added fortune-telling to massage
and hair-dressing.