Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (6 page)

 
          
“Well—you’d
better not, any longer,” Adele sharply advised; and he laughed, and promised to
go out and buy a new hat. In truth, careless of comfort as he was, he adored
luxury in women, and was resolved to let his wife ruin him if she did it
handsomely enough. Doubtless she might have, had fate given her time; but soon
after their marriage old Mr. Campton died, and it was found that a trusted
manager had so invested the profits of the Mangle that the heirg inherited only
a series of law-suits.

 
          
John
Campton, henceforth, was merely the unsuccessful son of a ruined manufacturer;
painting became a luxury lie could no longer afford, and his mother and sisters
besought him to come back and take over what was left of the business. It
seemed so clearly his duty that, with anguish of soul, he prepared to go; but
Juli£, on being consulted, developed a sudden passion for art and poverty.

 
          
“We’d
have to live in
Utica
—for some years at any rate?”

 
          
“Well,
yes, no doubt” They faced the fact desolately.

 
          
“They’d
much better look out for another manager. What do you know about business?
Since you’ve taken up painting you’d better try to make a success of that,” she
advised him; and he was too much of the same mind not to agree.

 
          
It
was not long before George’s birth, and they were fully resolved to go home for
the event, and thus spare their lioped-for heir the inconvenience of coming
into the world, like his father, in a foreign country. But now this was not to
be thought of, and the eventual inconvenience to George was lost sight of by
his progenitors in the contemplation of nearer problems.

 
          
For
a few years their life dragged along shabbily and depressingly. Now that
Campton’s painting was no longer an amateur’s hobby but a domestic obligation,
Julia thought it her duty to interest herself in it; and her only idea of doing
so was by means of what she called “relations,” using the word in its French
and diplomatic sense.

 
          
She
was convinced that her husband’s lack of success was due to Beausite’s
blighting epigram, and to Campton’s subsequent resolve to strike out for
himself. “It’s a great mistake to try to be original till people have got used
to you,” she said, with the shrewdness that sometimes startled him. “If you’d
only been civil to Beausite he would have ended by taking you up, and then you
could have painted as queerly as you liked.”

 
          
Beausite,
by this time, had succumbed to the honours which lie in wait for such talents,
and in his starred and titled maturity his earlier dread of rivals had given
way to a prudent benevolence. Young artists were always welcome at the
receptions he gave in his sumptuous hotel of the Avenue du Bois. Those who
threatened to be rivals were even invited to dine; and Julia was justified in
triumphing when such an invitation finally rewarded her efforts.

 
          
Campton,
with a laugh, threw the card into the stove.

 
          
“If
you’d only understand that that’s not the way,” he said.

 
          
“What
is, then?”

 
          
“Why,
letting all that lot see what unutterable rubbish one thinks them!”

 
          
“I
should have thought you’d tried that long enough,” she said with pale lips; but
he answered jovially that it never palled on him.

 
          
She
was bitterly offended; but she knew Campton by this time, and was not a woman
to waste herself in vain resentment. She simply suggested that since he would
not profit by Beausite’s advance the only alternative was to try to get orders
for portraits; and though at that stage he was not in the mood for
portrait-painting, he made an honest attempt to satisfy her. She began, of
course, by sitting for him. She sat again and again; but, lovely as she was, he
was not inspired, and one day, in sheer self-defence, he blurted out that she
was not paintable. She never forgot the epithet, and it loomed large in their
subsequent recriminations.

 
          
Adele
Anthony—it was just like her—gave him his first order, and she did prove
paintable. Campton made a success of her long crooked pink-nosed face; but she
didn’t perceive it (she had wanted something oval, with tulle, and a rose in a
tape hand), and after heroically facing the picture for six months she hid it
away in an attic, whence, a year or so before the date of the artist’s present
musings, it had been fished out as an “early Campton,” to be exhibited half a
dozen times, and have articles written about it in the leading art reviews.

 
          
Adele’s
picture acted as an awful warning to intending patrons, and after one or two
attempts at depicting mistrustful friends Campton refused to constrain his
muse, and no more was said of portrait-painting. But life in
Paris
was growing too expensive. He persuaded Julia
to try
Spain
, and they wandered about there for a year. She was not fault-finding,
she did not complain, but she hated travelling, she could not eat things cooked
in oil, and his pictures seemed to her to be growing more and more ugly and
unsalable.

 
          
Finally
they came one day to Ronda, after a trying sojourn at Cordova. In the train
Julia had moaned a little at the mosquitoes of the previous night, and at the
heat and dirt of the second-class compartment; then, always conscious of the
ill-breeding of fretfulness, she had bent her lovely head above her Tauchnitz.
And it was then that Campton, looking out of the window to avoid her fatally
familiar profile, had suddenly discovered another. It was that of a peasant
girl in front of a small whitewashed house, under a white pergola hung with
bunches of big red peppers. The house, which was close to the railway, was
propped against an orange-coloured rock, and in the glare cast up from the red
earth its walls looked as blue as snow in shadow. The girl was all blue-white
too, from her cotton skirt to the kerchief knotted turbanwise above two folds
of blue-black hair. Her round forehead and merry nose were relieved like a
bronze medallion against the wall; and she stood with her hands on her hips,
laughing at a little pig asleep under a cork-tree, who lay on his side like a
dog.

 
          
The
vision filled the carriage-window and then vanished; but it remained so sharply
impressed on Campton that even then he knew what was going to happen. He leaned
back with a sense of relief, and forgot everything else.

 
          
The
next morning he said to his wife: “There’s a little place up the line that I
want to go back and paint. You don’t mind staying here a day or two, do you?”

 
          
She
said she did not mind; it was what she always said; but he was somehow aware
that this was the particular grievance she had always been waiting for. He did
not care for that, or for anything but getting a seat in the diligence which
started every morning for the village nearest the white house. On the way he remembered
that he had left Julia only forty pesetas, but he did not care about that
either… He stayed a month, and when he returned to Ronda his wife had gone back
to
Paris
, leaving a letter to say that the matter
was in the hands of her lawyers.

 
          
“What
did you do it for—I mean in that particular way? For goodness knows I
understand all the rest,” Adele Anthony had once asked him, while the divorce
proceedings were going on; and he had shaken his head, conscious that he could
not explain.

 
          
It
was a year or two later that he met the first person who did understand: a
Russian lady who had heard the story, was curious to know him, and asked, one
day, when their friendship had progressed, to see the sketches he had brought
back for his fugue.

 
          
“Comme
je vous comprends!” she murmured, her grey eyes deep in his; but perceiving
that she did not allude to the sketches, but to his sentimental adventure,
Campton pushed the drawings out of sight, vexed with himself for having shown
them.

 
          
He
forgave the Russian lady her artistic obtuseness for the sake of her human
comprehension. They had met at the loneliest moment of his life, when his art
seemed to have failed him like everything else, and when the struggle to get
possession of his son, which had been going on in the courts ever since the
break with Julia, had finally been decided against him. His Russian friend
consoled, amused and agitated him, and after a few years drifted out of his
life as irresponsibly as she had drifted into it; and he found himself, at forty-five,
a lonely thwarted man, as full as ever of faith in his own powers, but with
little left in human nature or in opportunity. It was about this time that he
heard that Julia was to marry again, and that his boy would have a stepfather.

 
          
He
knew that even his own family thought it “the best thing that could happen.”
They were tired of clubbing together to pay Julia’s alimony, and heaved a
united sigh of relief when they learned that her second choice had fallen, not
on the bankrupt “foreign Count” they had always dreaded, but on the Paris
partner of the famous bank of Bullard and Brant. Mr. Brant’s request that his
wife’s alimony should be discontinued gave him a moral superiority which even
Campton’s recent successes could not shake. It was felt that the request
expressed the contempt of an income easily counted in seven figures for a
pittance painfully screwed up to four; and the Camptons admired Mr. Brant much
more for not needing their money than for refusing it.

 
          
Their
attitude left John Campton without support in his struggle to keep a hold on
his boy. His family sincerely thought George safer with the Brants than with
his own father, and the father could advance to the contrary no arguments they
would have understood. All the forces of order seemed leagued against him; and
it was perhaps this fact that suddenly drove him into conformity with them. At
any rate, from the day of Julia’s remarriage no other woman shared her former
husband’s life. Campton settled down to the solitude of his dusty studio at
Montmartre
, and painted doggedly, all his thoughts on
George.

 
          
At
this point in his reminiscences the bells of Sainte Clotilde rang out the
half-hour after
midnight
,
and Campton rose and went into the darkened sitting-room.

 
          
The
door into George’s room was open, and in the silence the father heard the boy’s
calm breathing. A light from the bathroom cast its ray on the dressing-table,
which was scattered with the contents of George’s pockets. Campton, dwelling
with a new tenderness on everything that belonged to his son, noticed a smart
antelope card-case (George had his mother’s weakness for
Bond Street
novelties), a wrist-watch, his studs, a
bundle of bank-notes; and beside these a thumbed and dirty red book, the size
of a large pocket diary.

 
          
The
father wondered what it was; then of a sudden he knew. He had once seen Mme.
Lebel’s grandson pull just such a red book from his pocket as he was leaving
for his “twenty-eight days” of military service; it was the livret militaire
that every French citizen under forty-eight carries about with him.

 
          
Campton
had never paid much attention to French military regulations: George’s service
over, he had dismissed the matter from his mind, forgetting that his son was
still a member of the French army, and as closely linked to the fortunes of
France as the grandson of the
concierges
of Montmartre. Now it occurred to him that that little red book would answer
the questions he had not dared to put; and stealing in, he possessed himself of
it and carried it back to the sitting-room. There he sat down by the lamp and
read.

 
          
First
George’s name, his domicile, his rank as a marechal des logis of dragoons, the
number of his regiment and its base: all that was already familiar. But what
was this on the next page?

 
          
“In
case of general mobilisation announced to the populations of
France
by public proclamations, or by notices
posted in the streets, the bearer of this order is to rejoin his regiment at.