Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (47 page)

 
          
On
the day in question he had turned up unexpectedly, inviting himself to dine
with Campton and smoke a cigar afterward in the quiet window overhanging
Paris
. Campton was glad to have him there; no one
could tell him more than Boylston about the American soldiers, their numbers,
the accommodations prepared for their reception, their first contact with the
other belligerents, and their own view of the business they were about. And the
two chatted quietly in the twilight till the young man, rising, said it was
time to be off.

 
          
“Back to your shop?”

 
          
“Rather!
There’s a night’s work ahead. But I’m as good as new after our talk.”

 
          
Campton
looked at him wistfully. “You know I’d like to paint you some day.”

 
          
“Oh”
cried Boylston, suffused with blushes; and added with a laugh: “It’s my
uniform, not me.”

 
          
“Well,
your uniform is you—it’s all of you young men.”

 
          
Boylston
stood in the window twisting his cap about undecidedly. “Look here, sir—now
that you’ve got back to work again—”

 
          
“Well?”
Campton interrupted suspiciously.

 
          
The
young man cleared his throat and spoke with a rush. “His mother wants most
awfully that something should be decided about the monument.”

 
          
“Monument?
What monument? I don’t want my son to have a
monument,” Campton exploded.

 
          
But
Boylston stuck to his point. “It’ll break her heart if something isn’t put on
the grave before long.
It’s
five months now—and they
fully recognize your right to decide”

 
          
“Damn
what they recognize! It was they who brought him to
Paris
; they made him travel when he wasn’t fit;
they killed him.”

 
          
“Well—supposing
they did: judge how much more they must be suffering!”

 
          
“Let
’em suffer. He’s my son—my son. He isn’t Brant’s.”

 
          
“Miss
Anthony thinks”

 
          
“And
he’s not hers either, that I know of!”

 
          
Boylston
seemed to hesitate. “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it, sir? You’ve had him; you
have him still. Nobody can touch that fact, or take it from you. Every hour of
his life was yours. But they’ve never had anything, those two others, Mr. Brant
and Miss Anthony; nothing but a reflected light. And so every outward sign
means more to them. I’m putting it badly, I know”

 
          
Campton
held out his hand. “You don’t mean to, I suppose. But better not put it at all.
Good night,” he said. And on the threshold he called out sardonically: “And
who’s going to pay for a monument, I’d like to know?”

 
          
A
monument—they wanted a monument! Wanted him to decide about it, plan it,
perhaps
design it—good Lord, he didn’t know! No doubt it all
seemed simple enough to them: anything did, that money could buy… When he
couldn’t yet bear to turn that last canvas out from the wall, or look into the
old portfolio even… Suffering, suffering! What did they any of them know about
suffering? Going over old photographs, comparing studies, recalling scenes and
sayings, discussing with some sculptor or other the shape of George’s eyelids,
the spring of his chest-muscles, the way his hair grew and his hands,
moved—why, it was like digging him up again out of that peaceful corner of the
Neuilly cemetery where at last he was resting, like dragging him back to the
fret and the fever, and the senseless roar of the guns that still went on.

 
          
And
then: as he’d said to Boylston, who was to pay for their monument? Even if the
making of it had struck him as a way of getting nearer to his boy, instead of
building up a marble wall between them—even if the idea had appealed to him, he
hadn’t a penny to spare for such an undertaking. In the first place, he never
intended to paint again for money; never intended to do anything but these
gaunt and serious or round and babyish young American faces above their stiff
military collard, and when their portraits were finished to put them away,
locked up for his own pleasure; and what he had earned in the last years was to
be partly for these young men—for their reading-rooms, clubs, recreation
centres, whatever was likely to give them temporary rest and solace in the grim
months to come; and partly for such of the
protégés
of “The Friends of French Art” as had been deprived of aid under the new
management. Tales of private jealousy and petty retaliation came to Campton
daily, now that Mme. Beausite administered the funds; Adele Anthony and Mile.
Davril, bursting with the wrongs of their pensioners, were always appealing to
him for help. And then, hidden behind these more or less valid reasons, the old
instinctive dread of spending had reasserted itself, he couldn’t tell how or
why, unless through some dim opposition to the Brants’ perpetual outpouring;
their hospitals, their motors, their bribes, their orchids, and now their
monument—their monument!

 
          
He
sought refuge from it all with his soldiers, haunting for hours every day one
of the newly-opened Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Clubs. Adele Anthony had already
found a job there, and was making a success of it. She looked twenty years
older since George was gone, but she stuck to her work with the same humorous
pertinacity; and with her mingled heartiness and ceremony, her funny
resuscitation of obsolete American slang, and her ability to answer all their
most disconcerting questions about Paris and France (Montmartre included), she
easily eclipsed the ministering angels who twanged the home-town chord and
called them “boys.”

 
          
The
young men appeared to return
Campton’s liking
; it was
as if they had guessed that he needed them, and wanted to offer him their shy
help. He was conscious of something rather protecting in their attitude, of his
being to them a vague unidentified figure, merely “the old gentleman” who was
friendly to them; but he didn’t mind. It was enough to sit and listen to their
talk, to try and clear up a few of the countless puzzles which confronted them,
to render them such fatherly services as he could, and in the interval to jot
down notes of their faces—their inexhaustibly inspiring faces. Sometimes to
talk with them was like being on the floor in George’s nursery, among the
blocks and the tin soldiers; sometimes like walking with young archangels in a
cool empty heaven; but wherever he was he always had the sense of being among
his own,
the
sense he had never had since George’s
death.

 
          
To
think of them all as George’s brothers, to study out the secret likeness to him
in their young dedicated faces: that was now his one passion, his sustaining
task; it was at such times that his son came back and sat among them…

 
          
Gradually,
as the weeks passed, the first of his new friends, officers and soldiers, were
dispersed throughout the training camps, and new faces succeeded to those he
had tried to fix on his canvas; an endless line of Benny Upshers, baby-Georges,
schoolboy Boylstons, they seemed to be. Campton saw each one go with a fresh
pang, knowing that every move brought them so much nearer to the front, that
ever-ravening and inexorable front. They were always happy to be gone; and that
only increased his pain. Now and then he attached himself more particularly to
one of the young men, because of some look of the eyes or some turn of the mind
like George’s; and then the parting became anguish.

 
          
One
day a second lieutenant came to the studio to take leave. He had been an early
recruit of Plattsburg, and his military training was so far advanced that he
counted on being among the first officers sent to the fighting line. He was a
fresh-coloured lad, with fair hair that stood up in a defiant crest.

 
          
“There
are so few of us, and there’s so little time to lose; they can’t afford to be
too particular,” he laughed.

 
          
It
was just the sort of thing that George would have said, and the laugh was like
an echo of George’s. At the sound Campton suddenly burst into tears, and was
aware of his visitor’s looking at him with eyes of dismay and compassion.

 
          
“Oh,
don’t, sir, don’t,” the young man pleaded, wringing the painter’s hand, and
making what decent haste he could to get out of the studio.

 
          
Campton,
left alone, turned once more to his easel. He sat down before a canvas on which
he had blocked out a group of soldiers playing cards at their club; but after a
stroke or two he threw aside his brush, and remained with his head bowed on his
hands, a lonely tired old man.

 
          
He
had kept a cheerful front at his son’s going; and now he could not say goodbye
to one of these young fellow without crying. Well—it was because he had no one
left of his own, he supposed. Loneliness like his took all a man’s strength
from him…

 
          
The
bell rang, but he did not move. It rang again; then the door was pushed timidly
open, and Mrs. Talkett came in. He had not seen her since the day of George’s
funeral, when he had fancied he detected her in a shrunken black-veiled figure
hurrying past in the meaningless line of mourners.

 
          
In
her usual abrupt fashion she began, without a greeting: “I’ve come to say
goodbye; I’m going to
America
.”

 
          
He
looked at her remotely, hardly hearing what she said.
“To
America
?”

 
          
“Yes;
to join my husband.”

 
          
He
continued to consider her in silence, and she frowned in her perplexed and
fretful way. “He’s at Plattsburg, you know.” Her eyes wandered unseeingly about
the studio. “There’s nothing else to do, is there—now—here or anywhere? So I
sail tomorrow; I mean to take a house somewhere near him. He’s not well, and he
writes that he misses me. The life in camp is so unsuited to him——”

 
          
Campton
still listened absently. “Oh, you’re right to go,” he agreed at length,
supposing it was what she expected of him.

 
          
“Am
I?”
She half-smiled.
“What’s right and what’s wrong? I
don’t know any longer. I’m only trying to do what I suppose George would have
wanted.” She stood uncertainly in front of Campton. “All I do know,” she cried,
with a sharp break in her voice, “is that I’ve never in my life been happy
enough to be so unhappy!” And she threw herself down on the divan in a storm of
desolate sobbing.

 
          
After
he had comforted her as best he could, and she had gone away, Campton continued
to wander up and down the studio forlornly. That cry of hers kept on echoing in
his ears: “I’ve never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!” It
associated itself suddenly with a phrase of Boylston’s that he had brushed away
unheeding: “You’ve had your son—you have him still; but those others have never
had anything.”

 
          
Yes;
Campton saw now that it was true of poor Madge Talkett, as it was of Adele
Anthony and Mr. Brant, and even in a measure of Julia. They had never—no, not
even George’s mother—had anything, in the close inextricable sense in which
Campton had had his son. And it was only now, in his own hour of destitution,
that he understood how much greater the depth of their poverty had been. He
recalled the frightened embarrassed look of the young lieutenant whom he had
discountenanced by his tears; and he said to himself: “The only thing that helps
is to be able to do things for people. I suppose that’s why Brant’s always
trying—”

 
          
Julia
too: it was strange that his thoughts should turn to her with such peculiar
pity. It was not because the boy had been born of her body: Campton did not see
her now, as he once had in a brief moment of compassion, as the young mother
bending illumined above her baby. He saw her as an old empty-hearted woman, and
asked himself how such an unmanageable monster as grief was to fill the room up
of her absent son.