Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
_BY EDITH WHARTON_
A SON AT THE FRONT
THE GREATER INCLINATION
THE TOUCHSTONE
CRUCIAL INSTANCES
THE VALLEY OF DECISION
SANCTUARY
THE DESCENT OF MAN
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH
THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
THE HERMIT AND THE WILD WOMAN
TALES OF MEN AND GHOSTS
ETHAN FROME
THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY
XINGU
IN MOROCCO
FIGHTING FRANCE
ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS
A MOTOR FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE
ARTEMIS TO ACTÆON
THE DECORATION OF HOUSES
_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_
A SON AT THE FRONT
BY
EDITH WHARTON
_Something veil’d and abstracted is often a part of the manners of these
beings._—WALT WHITMAN
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
MCMXXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1922, 1923, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1923
[Illustration]
IN MEMORY
OF
RONALD SIMMONS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOK I
A SON AT THE FRONT
I
John Campton, the American portrait-painter, stood in his bare studio in
Montmartre at the end of a summer afternoon contemplating a battered
calendar that hung against the wall.
The calendar marked July 30, 1914.
Campton looked at this date with a gaze of unmixed satisfaction. His
son, his only boy, who was coming from America, must have landed in
England that morning, and after a brief halt in London would join him
the next evening in Paris. To bring the moment nearer, Campton, smiling
at his weakness, tore off the leaf and uncovered the 31. Then, leaning
in the window, he looked out over his untidy scrap of garden at the
silver-grey sea of Paris spreading mistily below him.
A number of visitors had passed through the studio that day. After years
of obscurity Campton had been projected into the light—or perhaps only
into the limelight—by his portrait of his son George, exhibited three
years earlier at the spring show of the French Society of Painters and
Sculptors. The picture seemed to its author to be exactly in the line of
the unnoticed things he had been showing before, though perhaps nearer
to what he was always trying for, because of the exceptional interest of
his subject. But to the public he had appeared to take a new turn; or
perhaps some critic had suddenly found the right phrase for him; or,
that season, people wanted a new painter to talk about. Didn’t he know
by heart all the Paris reasons for success or failure?
The early years of his career had given him ample opportunity to learn
them. Like other young students of his generation, he had come to Paris
with an exaggerated reverence for the few conspicuous figures who made
the old Salons of the ’eighties like bad plays written around a few
stars. If he could get near enough to Beausite, the ruling light of the
galaxy, he thought he might do things not unworthy of that great master;
but Beausite, who had ceased to receive pupils, saw no reason for making
an exception in favour of an obscure youth without a backing. He was not
kind; and on the only occasion when a painting of Campton’s came under
his eye he let fall an epigram which went the round of Paris, but
shocked its victim by its revelation of the great man’s ineptitude.
Campton, if he could have gone on admiring Beausite’s work, would have
forgotten his unkindness and even his critical incapacity; but as the
young painter’s personal convictions developed he discovered that his
idol had none, and that the dazzling _maëstria_ still enveloping his
work was only the light from a dead star.
All these things were now nearly thirty years old. Beausite had vanished
from the heavens, and the youth he had sneered at throned there in his
stead. Most of the people who besieged Campton’s studio were the lineal
descendants of those who had echoed Beausite’s sneer. They belonged to
the types that Campton least cared to paint; but they were usually those
who paid the highest prices, and he had lately had new and imperious
reasons for wanting to earn all the money he could. So for two years he
had let it be as difficult and expensive as possible to be “done by
Campton”; and this oppressive July day had been crowded with the visits
of suppliants of a sort unused to waiting on anybody’s pleasure, people
who had postponed St. Moritz and Deauville, Aix and Royat, because it
was known that one had to accept the master’s conditions or apply
elsewhere.
The job bored him more than ever; the more of their fatuous faces he
recorded the more he hated the task; but for the last two or three days
the monotony of his toil had been relieved by a new element of interest.
This was produced by what he called the “war-funk,” and consisted in the
effect on his sitters and their friends of the suggestion that something
new, incomprehensible and uncomfortable might be about to threaten the
ordered course of their pleasures.
Campton himself did not “believe in the war” (as the current phrase
went); therefore he was able to note with perfect composure its
agitating effect upon his sitters. On the whole the women behaved best:
the idiotic Mme. de Dolmetsch had actually grown beautiful through fear
for her lover, who turned out (in spite of a name as exotic as hers) to
be a French subject of military age. The men had made a less creditable
showing—especially the big banker and promoter, Jorgenstein, whose round
red face had withered like a pricked balloon, and young Prince Demetrios
Palamèdes, just married to the fabulously rich daughter of an Argentine
wheat-grower, and so secure as to his bride’s fortune that he could
curse impartially all the disturbers of his summer plans. Even the great
tuberculosis specialist, Fortin-Lescluze, whom Campton was painting in
return for the physician’s devoted care of George the previous year, had
lost something of his professional composure, and no longer gave out the
sense of tranquillizing strength which had been such a help in the boy’s
fight for health. Fortin-Lescluze, always in contact with the rulers of
the earth, must surely have some hint of their councils. Whatever it
was, he revealed nothing, but continued to talk frivolously and
infatuatedly about a new Javanese dancer whom he wanted Campton to
paint; but his large beaked face with its triumphant moustache had grown
pinched and grey, and he had forgotten to renew the dye on the
moustache.
Campton’s one really imperturbable visitor was little Charlie Alicante,
the Spanish secretary of Embassy at Berlin, who had dropped in on his
way to St. Moritz, bringing the newest news from the Wilhelmstrasse news
that was all suavity and reassurance, with a touch of playful reproach
for the irritability of French feeling, and a reminder of Imperial
longanimity in regard to the foolish misunderstandings of Agadir and
Saverne.
Now all the visitors had gone, and Campton, leaning in the window,
looked out over Paris and mused on his summer plans. He meant to plunge
straight down to Southern Italy and Sicily, perhaps even push over to
North Africa. That at least was what he hoped for: no sun was too hot
for him and no landscape too arid. But it all depended on George; for
George was going with him, and if George preferred Spain they would
postpone the desert.
It was almost impossible to Campton to picture what it would be like to
have the boy with him. For so long he had seen his son only in snatches,
hurriedly, incompletely, uncomprehendingly: it was only in the last
three years that their intimacy had had a chance to develop. And they
had never travelled together, except for hasty dashes, two or three
times, to seashore or mountains; had never gone off on a long solitary
journey such as this. Campton, tired, disenchanted, and nearing sixty,
found himself looking forward to the adventure with an eagerness as
great as the different sort of ardour with which, in his youth, he had
imagined flights of another kind with the woman who was to fulfill every
dream.
“Well—I suppose that’s the stuff pictures are made of,” he thought,
smiling at his inextinguishable belief in the completeness of his next
experience. Life had perpetually knocked him down just as he had his
hand on her gifts; nothing had ever succeeded with him but his work. But
he was as sure as ever that peace of mind and contentment of heart were
waiting for him round the next corner; and this time, it was clear, they
were to come to him through his wonderful son.
The doorbell rang, and he listened for the maidservant’s step. There was
another impatient jingle, and he remembered that his faithful Mariette
had left for Lille, where she was to spend her vacation with her family.
Campton, reaching for his stick, shuffled across the studio with his
lame awkward stride.
At the door stood his old friend Paul Dastrey, one of the few men with
whom he had been unbrokenly intimate since the first days of his
disturbed and incoherent Parisian life. Dastrey came in without
speaking: his small dry face, seamed with premature wrinkles of irony
and sensitiveness, looked unusually grave. The wrinkles seemed suddenly
to have become those of an old man; and how grey Dastrey had turned! He
walked a little stiffly, with a jauntiness obviously intended to conceal
a growing tendency to rheumatism.
In the middle of the floor he paused and tapped a varnished boot-tip
with his stick.
“Let’s see what you’ve done to Daisy Dolmetsch.”
“Oh, it’s been done for me—you’ll see!” Campton laughed. He was enjoying
the sight of Dastrey and thinking that this visit was providentially
timed to give him a chance of expatiating on his coming journey. In his
rare moments of expansiveness he felt the need of some substitute for
the background of domestic sympathy which, as a rule, would have simply
bored or exasperated him; and at such times he could always talk to
Dastrey.
The little man screwed up his eyes and continued to tap his varnished
toes.
“But she’s magnificent. She’s seen the Medusa!”
Campton laughed again. “Just so. For days and days I’d been trying to do
something with her; and suddenly the war-funk did it for me.”
“The war-funk?”
“Who’d have thought it? She’s frightened to death about Ladislas
Isador—who is French, it turns out, and mobilisable. The poor soul
thinks there’s going to be war!”
“Well, there _is_,” said Dastrey.
The two men looked at each other: Campton amused, incredulous, a shade
impatient at the perpetual recurrence of the same theme, and aware of
presenting a smile of irritating unresponsiveness to his friend’s solemn
gaze.
“Oh, come—you too? Why, the Duke of Alicante has just left here, fresh
from Berlin. You ought to hear him laugh at us....”
“How about Berlin’s laughing at _him_?” Dastrey sank into a wicker
armchair, drew out a cigarette and forgot to light it. Campton returned
to the window.
“There can’t be war: I’m going to Sicily and Africa with George the day
after to-morrow,” he broke out.
“Ah, George——. To be sure....”
There was a silence; Dastrey had not even smiled. He turned the unlit
cigarette in his dry fingers.
“Too young for ’seventy—and too old for this! Some men are born under a
curse,” he burst out.
“What on earth are you talking about?” Campton exclaimed, forcing his
gaiety a little.
Dastrey stared at him with furious eyes. “But I shall get something,
somewhere ... they can’t stop a man’s enlisting ... I had an old uncle
who did it in ’seventy ... he was older than I am now.”
Campton looked at him compassionately. Poor little circumscribed Paul
Dastrey, whose utmost adventure had been an occasional article in an art
review, an occasional six weeks in the near East! It was pitiful to see
him breathing fire and fury on an enemy one knew to be engaged, at that
very moment, in meeting England and France more than half-way in the
effort to smooth over diplomatic difficulties. But Campton could make
allowances for the nerves of the tragic generation brought up in the
shadow of Sedan.
“Look here,” he said, “I’ll tell you what. Come along with George and
me—as far as Palermo, anyhow. You’re a little stiff again in that left
knee, and we can bake our lamenesses together in the good Sicilian
oven.”
Dastrey had found a match and lighted his cigarette.
“My poor Campton—there’ll be war in three days.”
Campton’s incredulity was shot through with the deadly chill of
conviction. There it was—there would be war! It was too like his cursed
luck not to be true.... He smiled inwardly, perceiving that he was
viewing the question exactly as the despicable Jorgenstein and the
fatuous Prince Demetrios had viewed it: as an unwarrantable interference
with his private plans. Yes—but his case was different.... Here was the
son he had never seen enough of, never till lately seen at all as most
fathers see their sons; and the boy was to be packed off to New York
that winter, to go into a bank; and for the Lord knew how many months
this was to be their last chance, as it was almost their first, of being
together quietly, confidentially, uninterruptedly. These other men were
whining at the interruption of their vile pleasures or their viler
money-making; he, poor devil, was trembling for the chance to lay the
foundation of a complete and lasting friendship with his only son, at
the moment when such understandings do most to shape a youth’s
future.... “And with what I’ve had to fight against!” he groaned, seeing
victory in sight, and sickening at the idea that it might be snatched
from him.
Then another thought came, and he felt the blood leaving his ruddy face
and, as it seemed, receding from every vein of his heavy awkward body.
He sat down opposite Dastrey, and the two looked at each other.
“There won’t be war. But if there were—why shouldn’t George and I go to
Sicily? You don’t see us sitting here making lint, do you?”
Dastrey smiled. “Lint is unhygienic; you won’t have to do that. And I
see no reason why _you_ shouldn’t go to Sicily—or to China.” He paused.
“But how about George—I thought he and you were both born in France?”
Campton reached for a cigarette. “We were, worse luck. He’s subject to
your preposterous military regulations. But it doesn’t make any
difference, as it happens. He’s sure to be discharged after that touch
of tuberculosis he had last year, when he had to be rushed up to the
Engadine.”
“Ah, I see. Then, as you say.... Still, of course he wouldn’t be allowed
to leave the country.”
A constrained silence fell between the two. Campton became aware that,
for the first time since they had known each other, their points of view
were the width of the poles apart. It was hopeless to try to bridge such
a distance.
“Of course, you know,” he said, trying for his easiest voice, “I still
consider this discussion purely academic.... But if it turns out that
I’m wrong I shall do all I can—all I can, do you hear?—to get George
discharged.... You’d better know that....”
Dastrey, rising, held out his hand with his faithful smile. “My dear old
Campton, I perfectly understand a foreigner’s taking that view....” He
walked toward the door and they parted without more words.
When he had gone Campton began to recover his reassurance. Who was
Dastrey, poor chap, to behave as if he were in the councils of the
powers? It was perfect nonsense to pretend that a diplomatist straight
from Berlin didn’t know more about what was happening there than the
newsmongers of the Boulevards. One didn’t have to be an Ambassador to
see which way the wind was blowing; and men like Alicante, belonging to
a country uninvolved in the affair, were the only people capable of a
cool judgment at moments of international tension.
Campton took the portrait of Mme. de Dolmetsch and leaned it against the
other canvases along the wall. Then he started clumsily to put the room
to rights—without Mariette he was so helpless—and finally, abandoning
the attempt, said to himself: “I’ll come and wind things up to-morrow.”
He was moving that day from the studio to the Hotel de Crillon, where
George was to join him the next evening. It would be jolly to be with
the boy from the moment he arrived; and, even if Mariette’s departure
had not paralyzed his primitive housekeeping, he could not have made
room for his son at the studio. So, reluctantly, for he loathed luxury
and conformity, but joyously, because he was to be with George, Campton
threw some shabby clothes into a shapeless portmanteau, and prepared to
despatch the concierge for a taxicab.
He was hobbling down the stairs when the old woman met him with a
telegram. He tore it open and saw that it was dated Deauville, and was
not, as he had feared, from his son.
“Very anxious. Must see you to-morrow. Please come to Avenue Marigny at
five without fail. Julia Brant.”
“Oh, damn,” Campton growled, crumpling up the message.
The concierge was looking at him with searching eyes.
“Is it war, sir?” she asked, pointing to the bit of blue paper. He
supposed she was thinking of her grandsons.
“No—no—nonsense! War?” He smiled into her shrewd old face, every wrinkle
of which seemed full of a deep human experience.
“War? Can you imagine anything more absurd? Can you, now? What should
you say if they told you war was going to be declared, Mme. Lebel?”
She gave him back his look with profound earnestness; then she spoke in
a voice of sudden resolution. “Why, I should say we don’t want it,
sir—I’d have four in it if it came—_but that this sort of thing has got
to stop_.”
Campton shrugged. “Oh, well—it’s not going to come, so don’t worry. And
call me a taxi, will you? No, no, I’ll carry the bags down myself.”
II
“But even if they do mobilise: mobilisation is not war—_is_ it?” Mrs.
Anderson Brant repeated across the teacups.
Campton dragged himself up from the deep armchair he had inadvertently
chosen. To escape from his hostess’s troubled eyes he limped across to
the window and stood gazing out at the thick turf and brilliant
flower-borders of the garden which was so unlike his own. After a moment
he turned and glanced about him, catching the reflection of his heavy
figure in a mirror dividing two garlanded panels. He had not entered
Mrs. Brant’s drawing-room for nearly ten years; not since the period of
the interminable discussions about the choice of a school for George;
and in spite of the far graver preoccupations that now weighed on him,
and of the huge menace with which the whole world was echoing, he paused
for an instant to consider the contrast between his clumsy person and
that expensive and irreproachable room.
“You’ve taken away Beausite’s portrait of you,” he said abruptly,
looking up at the chimney-panel, which was filled with the blue and
umber bloom of a Fragonard landscape.
A full-length of Mrs. Anderson Brant by Beausite had been one of Mr.
Brant’s wedding-presents to his bride; a Beausite portrait, at that
time, was as much a part of such marriages as pearls and sables.
“Yes. Anderson thought ... the dress had grown so dreadfully
old-fashioned,” she explained indifferently; and went on again: “You
think it’s _not_ war: don’t you?”
What was the use of telling her what he thought? For years and years he
had not done that—about anything. But suddenly, now, a stringent
necessity had drawn them together, confronting them like any two plain
people caught in a common danger—like husband and wife, for example!
“It _is_ war, this time, I believe,” he said.
She set down her cup with a hand that had begun to tremble.
“I disagree with you entirely,” she retorted, her voice shrill with
anxiety. “I was frightfully upset when I sent you that telegram
yesterday; but I’ve been lunching to-day with the old Duc de
Montlhéry—you know he fought in ’seventy—and with Lévi-Michel of the
‘Jour,’ who had just seen some of the government people; and they both
explained to me quite clearly——”
“That you’d made a mistake in coming up from Deauville?”
To save himself Campton could not restrain the sneer; on the rare
occasions when a crisis in their lives flung them on each other’s mercy,
the first sensation he was always conscious of was the degree to which
she bored him. He remembered the day, years ago, long before their
divorce, when it had first come home to him that she was always going to
bore him. But he was ashamed to think of that now, and went on more
patiently: “You see, the situation is rather different from anything
we’ve known before; and, after all, in 1870 all the wise people thought
till the last minute that there would be no war.”
Her delicate face seemed to shrink and wither with apprehension.
“Then—what about George?” she asked, the paint coming out about her
haggard eyes.
Campton paused a moment. “You may suppose I’ve thought of _that_.”
“Oh, of course....” He saw she was honestly trying to be what a mother
should be in talking of her only child to that child’s father. But the
long habit of superficiality made her stammering and inarticulate when
her one deep feeling tried to rise to the surface.
Campton seated himself again, taking care to choose a straight-backed
chair. “I see nothing to worry about with regard to George,” he said.
“You mean——?”
“Why, they won’t take him—they won’t want him ... with his medical
record.”
“Are you sure? He’s so much stronger.... He’s gained twenty pounds....”
It was terrible, really, to hear her avow it in a reluctant whisper!
That was the view that war made mothers take of the chief blessing they
could ask for their children! Campton understood her, and took the same
view. George’s wonderful recovery, the one joy his parents had shared in
the last twenty years, was now a misfortune to be denied and dissembled.
They looked at each other like accomplices, the same thought in their
eyes: if only the boy had been born in America! It was grotesque that
the whole of joy or anguish should suddenly be found to hang on a
geographical accident.
“After all, we’re Americans; this is not our job—” Campton began.
“No—” He saw she was waiting, and knew for what.
“So of course—if there were any trouble—but there won’t be; if there
were, though, I shouldn’t hesitate to do what was necessary ... use any
influence....”
“Oh, then we agree!” broke from her in a cry of wonder.
The unconscious irony of the exclamation struck him, and increased his
irritation. He remembered the tone—undefinably compassionate—in which
Dastrey had said: “I perfectly understand a foreigner’s taking that
view”.... But _was_ he a foreigner, Campton asked himself? And what was
the criterion of citizenship, if he, who owed to France everything that
had made life worth while, could regard himself as owing her nothing,
now that for the first time he might have something to give her? Well,
for himself that argument was all right: preposterous as he thought
war—any war—he would have offered himself to France on the instant if
she had had any use for his lame carcass. But he had never bargained to
give her his only son.
Mrs. Brant went on in excited argument.
“Of course you know how careful I always am to do nothing about him
without consulting you; but since you feel about it as _we_ do——” She
blushed under her faint rouge. The “we” had slipped out accidentally,
and Campton, aware of turning hard-lipped and grim, sat waiting for her
to repair the blunder. Through the years of his poverty it had been
impossible not to put up, on occasions, with that odious first person
plural: as long as his wretched inability to make money had made it
necessary that his wife’s second husband should pay for his son’s keep,
such allusions had been part of Campton’s long expiation. But even then
he had tacitly made his former wife understand that, when they had to
talk of the boy, he could bear her saying “I think,” or “Anderson
thinks,” this or that, but not “_we_ think it.” And in the last few
years, since Campton’s unforeseen success had put him, to the
astonishment of every one concerned, in a position of financial
independence, “Anderson” had almost entirely dropped out of their talk
about George’s future. Mrs. Brant was not a clever woman, but she had a
social adroitness that sometimes took the place of intelligence.
On this occasion she saw her mistake so quickly, and blushed for it so
painfully, that at any other time Campton would have smiled away her
distress; but at the moment he could not stir a muscle to help her.
“Look here,” he broke out, “there are things I’ve had to accept in the
past, and shall have to accept in the future. The boy is to go into
Bullard and Brant’s—it’s agreed; I’m not sure enough of being able to
provide for him for the next few years to interfere with—with your plans
in that respect. But I thought it was understood once for all——”
She interrupted him excitedly. “Oh, of course ... of course. You must
admit I’ve always respected your feeling....”
He acknowledged awkwardly: “Yes.”
“Well, then—won’t you see that this situation is different, terribly
different, and that we ought all to work together? If Anderson’s
influence can be of use....”
“Anderson’s influence——” Campton’s gorge rose against the phrase! It was
always Anderson’s influence that had been invoked—and none knew better
than Campton himself how justly—when the boy’s future was under
discussion. But in this particular case the suggestion was intolerable.
“Of course,” he interrupted drily. “But, as it happens, I think I can
attend to this job myself.”
She looked down at her huge rings, hesitated visibly, and then flung
tact to the winds. “What makes you think so? You don’t know the right
sort of people.”
It was a long time since she had thrown that at him: not since the
troubled days of their marriage, when it had been the cruellest taunt
she could think of. Now it struck him simply as a particularly
unpalatable truth. No, he didn’t know “the right sort of people” ...
unless, for instance, among his new patrons, such a man as Jorgenstein
answered to the description. But, if there were war, on what side would
a cosmopolitan like Jorgenstein turn out to be?
“Anderson, you see,” she persisted, losing sight of everything in the
need to lull her fears, “Anderson knows all the political people. In a
business way, of course, a big banker has to. If there’s really any
chance of George’s being taken you’ve no right to refuse Anderson’s
help—none whatever!”
Campton was silent. He had meant to reassure her, to reaffirm his
conviction that the boy was sure to be discharged. But as their eyes met
he saw that she believed this no more than he did; and he felt the
contagion of her incredulity.
“But if you’re so sure there’s not going to be war——” he began.
As he spoke he saw her face change, and was aware that the door behind
him had opened and that a short man, bald and slim, was advancing at a
sort of mincing trot across the pompous garlands of the Savonnerie
carpet. Campton got to his feet. He had expected Anderson Brant to stop
at sight of him, mumble a greeting, and then back out of the room—as
usual. But Anderson Brant did nothing of the sort: he merely hastened
his trot toward the tea-table. He made no attempt to shake hands with
Campton, but bowing shyly and stiffly said: “I understood you were
coming, and hurried back ... on the chance ... to consult....”
Campton gazed at him without speaking. They had not seen each other
since the extraordinary occasion, two years before, when Mr. Brant,
furtively one day at dusk, had come to his studio to offer to buy
George’s portrait; and, as their eyes met, the memory of that visit
reddened both their faces.
Mr. Brant was a compact little man of about sixty. His sandy hair, just
turning grey, was brushed forward over a baldness which was ivory-white
at the crown and became brick-pink above the temples, before merging
into the tanned and freckled surface of his face. He was always dressed
in carefully cut clothes of a discreet grey, with a tie to match, in
which even the plump pearl was grey, so that he reminded Campton of a
dry perpendicular insect in protective tints; and the fancy was
encouraged by his cautious manner, and the way he had of peering over
his glasses as if they were part of his armour. His feet were small and
pointed, and seemed to be made of patent leather; and shaking hands with
him was like clasping a bunch of twigs.
It had been Campton’s lot, on the rare occasions of his meeting Mr.
Brant, always to see this perfectly balanced man in moments of
disequilibrium, when the attempt to simulate poise probably made him
more rigid than nature had created him. But to-day his perturbation
betrayed itself in the gesture with which he drummed out a tune on the
back of the gold and platinum cigar-case he had unconsciously drawn from
his pocket.
After a moment he seemed to become aware of what he had in his hand, and
pressing the sapphire spring held out the case with the remark:
“Coronas.”
Campton made a movement of refusal, and Mr. Brant, overwhelmed, thrust
the cigar-case away.
“I ought to have taken one—I may need him,” Campton thought; and Mrs.
Brant said, addressing her husband: “He thinks as _we_ do—exactly.”
Campton winced. Thinking as the Brants did was, at all times, so foreign
to his nature and his principles that his first impulse was to protest.
But the sight of Mr. Brant, standing there helplessly, and trying to
hide the twitching of his lip by stroking his lavender-scented moustache
with a discreetly curved hand, moved the painter’s imagination.
“Poor devil—he’d give all his millions if the boy were safe,” he
thought, “and he doesn’t even dare to say so.”
It satisfied Campton’s sense of his rights that these two powerful
people were hanging on his decision like frightened children, and he
answered, looking at Mrs. Brant: “There’s nothing to be done at present
... absolutely nothing—— Except,” he added abruptly, “to take care not
to talk in this way to George.”
Mrs. Brant lifted a startled gaze.
“What do you mean? If war is declared, you can’t expect me not to speak
of it to him.”
“Speak of it as much as you like, but don’t drag him in. Let him work
out his own case for himself.”
He went on with an effort: “It’s what I intend to do.”
“But you said you’d use every influence!” she protested, obtusely.
“Well—I believe this is one of them.”
She looked down resignedly at her clasped hands, and he saw her lips
tighten. “My telling her that has been just enough to start her on the
other tack,” he groaned to himself, all her old stupidities rising up
around him like a fog.
Mr. Brant gave a slight cough and removed his protecting hand from his
lips.
“Mr. Campton is right,” he said, quickly and timorously. “I take the
same view—entirely. George must not know that we are thinking of using
... any means....” He coughed again, and groped for the cigar-case.
As he spoke, there came over Campton a sense of their possessing a
common ground of understanding that Campton had never found in his wife.
He had had a hint of the same feeling, but had voluntarily stifled it,
on the day when Mr. Brant, apologetic yet determined, had come to the
studio to buy George’s portrait. Campton had seen then how the man
suffered from his failure, but had chosen to attribute his distress to
the humiliation of finding there were things his money could not
purchase. Now, that judgment seemed as unimaginative as he had once
thought Mr. Brant’s overture. Campton turned on the banker a look that
was almost brotherly.
“We men know ...” the look said; and Mr. Brant’s parched cheek was
suffused with a flush of understanding. Then, as if frightened at the
consequences of such complicity, he repeated his bow and went out.
When Campton issued forth into the Avenue Marigny, it came to him as a
surprise to see the old unheeding life of Paris still going on. In the
golden decline of day the usual throng of idlers sat under the
horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysées, children scampered between turf
and flowers, and the perpetual stream of motors rolled-up the central
avenue to the restaurants beyond the gates.
Under the last trees of the Avenue Gabriel the painter stood looking
across the Place de la Concorde. No doubt the future was dark: he had
guessed from Mr. Brant’s precipitate arrival that the banks and the
Stock Exchange feared the worst. But what could a man do, whose
convictions were so largely formed by the play of things on his retina,
when, in the setting sun, all that majesty of space and light and
architecture was spread out before him undisturbed? Paris was too
triumphant a fact not to argue down his fears. There she lay in the
security of her beauty, and once more proclaimed herself eternal.
III
The night was so lovely that, though the Boulogne express arrived late,
George at once proposed dining in the Bois.
His luggage, of which, as usual, there was a good deal, was dropped at
the Crillon, and they shot up the Champs Elysées as the summer dusk
began to be pricked by lamps.
“How jolly the old place smells!” George cried, breathing in the scent
of sun-warmed asphalt, of flowerbeds and freshly-watered dust. He seemed
as much alive to such impressions as if his first word at the station
had not been: “Well, this time I suppose we’re in for it.” In for it
they might be; but meanwhile he meant to enjoy the scents and scenes of
Paris as acutely and unconcernedly as ever.
Campton had hoped that he would pick out one of the humble cyclists’
restaurants near the Seine; but not he. “Madrid, is it?” he said gaily,
as the taxi turned into the Bois; and there they sat under the
illuminated trees, in the general glitter and expensiveness, with the
Tziganes playing down their talk, and all around them the painted faces
that seemed to the father so old and obvious, and to the son, no doubt,
so full of novelty and mystery.
The music made conversation difficult; but Campton did not care. It was
enough to sit and watch the face in which, after each absence, he noted
a new and richer vivacity. He had often tried to make up his mind if his
boy were handsome. Not that the father’s eye influenced the painter’s;
but George’s young head, with its thick blond thatch, the complexion
ruddy to the golden eyebrows, and then abruptly white on the forehead,
the short amused nose, the inquisitive eyes, the ears lying back flat to
the skull against curly edges of fair hair, defied all rules and escaped
all classifications by a mixture of romantic gaiety and shrewd plainness
like that in certain eighteenth-century portraits.
As father and son faced each other over the piled-up peaches, while the
last sparkle of champagne died down in their glasses, Campton’s thoughts
went back to the day when he had first discovered his son. George was a
schoolboy of twelve, at home for the Christmas holidays. At home meant
at the Brants’, since it was always there he stayed: his father saw him
only on certain days. Usually Mariette fetched him to the studio on one
afternoon in the week; but this particular week George was ill, and it
had been arranged that in case of illness his father was to visit him at
his mother’s. He had one of his frequent bad colds, and Campton recalled
him, propped up in bed in his luxurious overheated room, a scarlet
sweater over his nightshirt, a book on his thin knees, and his ugly
little fever-flushed face bent over it in profound absorption. Till that
moment George had never seemed to care for books: his father had
resigned himself to the probability of seeing him grow up into the
ordinary pleasant young fellow, with his mother’s worldly tastes. But
the boy was reading as only a bookworm reads—reading with his very
finger-tips, and his inquisitive nose, and the perpetual dart ahead of a
gaze that seemed to guess each phrase from its last word. He looked up
with a smile, and said: “Oh, Dad ...” but it was clear that he regarded
the visit as an interruption. Campton, leaning over, saw that the book
was a first edition of Lavengro.
“Where the deuce did you get that?”
George looked at him with shining eyes. “Didn’t you know? Mr. Brant has
started collecting first editions. There’s a chap who comes over from
London with things for him. He lets me have them to look at when I’m
seedy. I say, isn’t this topping? Do you remember the fight?” And,
marvelling once more at the ways of Providence, Campton perceived that
the millionaire’s taste for owning books had awakened in his stepson a
taste for reading them. “I couldn’t have done that for him,” the father
had reflected with secret bitterness. It was not that a bibliophile’s
library was necessary to develop a taste for letters; but that Campton
himself, being a small reader, had few books about him, and usually
borrowed those few. If George had lived with him he might never have
guessed the boy’s latent hunger, for the need of books as part of one’s
daily food would scarcely have presented itself to him.
From that day he and George had understood each other. Initiation had
come to them in different ways, but their ardour for beauty had the same
root. The visible world, and its transposition in terms of one art or
another, were thereafter the subject of their interminable talks; and
Campton, with a passionate interest, watched his son absorbing through
books what had mysteriously reached him through his paintbrush.
They had been parted often, and for long periods; first by George’s
schooling in England, next by his French military service, begun at
eighteen to facilitate his entry into Harvard; finally, by his sojourn
at the University. But whenever they were together they seemed to make
up in the first ten minutes for the longest separation; and since George
had come of age, and been his own master, he had given his father every
moment he could spare.
His career at Harvard had been interrupted, after two years, by the
symptoms of tuberculosis which had necessitated his being hurried off to
the Engadine. He had returned completely cured, and at his own wish had
gone back to Harvard; and having finished his course and taken his
degree, he had now come out to join his father on a long holiday before
entering the New York banking-house of Bullard and Brant.
Campton, looking at the boy’s bright head across the lights and flowers,
thought how incredibly stupid it was to sacrifice an hour of such a life
to the routine of money-getting; but he had had that question out with
himself once for all, and was not going to return to it. His own
success, if it lasted, would eventually help him to make George
independent; but meanwhile he had no right to interfere with the boy’s
business training. He had hoped that George would develop some marked
talent, some irresistible tendency which would decide his future too
definitely for interference; but George was twenty-five, and no such
call had come to him. Apparently he was fated to be only a delighted
spectator and commentator; to enjoy and interpret, not to create. And
Campton knew that this absence of a special bent, with the strain and
absorption it implies, gave the boy his peculiar charm. The trouble was
that it made him the prey of other people’s plans for him. And now all
these plans—Campton’s dreams for the future as well as the business
arrangements which were Mr. Brant’s contribution—might be wrecked by
to-morrow’s news from Berlin. The possibility still seemed unthinkable;
but in spite of his incredulity the evil shadow hung on him as he and
his son chatted of political issues.
George made no allusion to his own case: his whole attitude was so
dispassionate that his father began to wonder if he had not solved the
question by concluding that he would not pass the medical examination.
The tone he took was that the whole affair, from the point of view of
twentieth-century civilization, was too monstrous an incongruity for
something not to put a stop to it at the eleventh hour. His easy
optimism at first stimulated his father, and then began to jar on him.
“Dastrey doesn’t think it can be stopped,” Campton said at length.
The boy smiled.
“Dear old Dastrey! No, I suppose not. That after-Sedan generation have
got the inevitability of war in their bones. They’ve never been able to
get beyond it. _Our_ whole view is different: we’re internationals,
whether we want to be or not.”
“To begin with, if by ‘our’ view you mean yours and mine, you and I
haven’t a drop of French blood in us,” his father interposed, “and we
can never really know what the French feel on such matters.”
George looked at him affectionately. “Oh, but I didn’t—I meant ‘we’ in
the sense of my generation, of whatever nationality. I know French chaps
who feel as I do—Louis Dastrey, Paul’s nephew, for one; and lots of
English ones. They don’t believe the world will ever stand for another
war. It’s too stupidly uneconomic, to begin with: I suppose you’ve read
Angell? Then life’s worth too much, and nowadays too many millions of
people know it. That’s the way we all feel. Think of everything that
counts—art and science and poetry, and all the rest—going to smash at
the nod of some doddering diplomatist! It was different in old times,
when the best of life, for the immense majority, was never anything but
plague, pestilence and famine. People are too healthy and well-fed now;
they’re not going off to die in a ditch to oblige anybody.”
Campton looked away, and his eye, straying over the crowd, lit on the
long heavy face of Fortin-Lescluze, seated with a group of men on the
other side of the garden.
Why had it never occurred to him before that if there was one being in
the world who could get George discharged it was the great specialist
under whose care he had been?
“Suppose war does come,” the father thought, “what if I were to go over
and tell him I’ll paint his dancer?” He stood up and made his way
between the tables.
Fortin-Lescluze was dining with a party of jaded-looking politicians and
journalists. To reach him Campton had to squeeze past another table, at
which a fair worn-looking lady sat beside a handsome old man with a
dazzling mane of white hair and a Grand Officer’s rosette of the Legion
of Honour. Campton bowed, and the lady whispered something to her
companion, who returned a stately vacant salute. Poor old Beausite,
dining alone with his much-wronged and all-forgiving wife, bowing to the
people she told him to bow to, and placidly murmuring: “War—war,” as he
stuck his fork into the peach she had peeled!
At Fortin’s table the faces were less placid. The men greeted Campton
with a deference which was not lost on Mme. Beausite, and the painter
bent close over Fortin, embarrassed at the idea that she might overhear
him. “If I can make time for a sketch—will you bring your dancing lady
to-morrow?”
The physician’s eyes lit up under their puffy lids.
“My dear friend—will I? She’s simply set her heart on it!” He drew out
his watch and added: “But why not tell her the good news yourself? You
told me, I think, you’d never seen her? This is her last night at the
‘Posada,’ and if you’ll jump into my motor we shall be just in time to
see her come on.”
Campton beckoned to George, and father and son followed Fortin-Lescluze.
None of the three men, on the way back to Paris, made any reference to
the war. The physician asked George a few medical questions, and
complimented him on his look of recovered health; then the talk strayed
to studios and theatres, where Fortin-Lescluze firmly kept it.
The last faint rumours of the conflict died out on the threshold of the
“Posada.” It would have been hard to discern, in the crowded audience,
any appearance but that of ordinary pleasure-seekers momentarily stirred
by a new sensation. Collectively, fashionable Paris was already away, at
the seashore or in the mountains, but not a few of its chief ornaments
still lingered, as the procession through Campton’s studio had proved;
and others had returned drawn back by doubts about the future, the
desire to be nearer the source of news, the irresistible French craving
for the forum and the market when messengers are foaming in. The public
of the “Posada,” therefore, was still Parisian enough to flatter the new
dancer; and on all the pleasure-tired faces, belonging to every type of
money-getters and amusement-seekers, Campton saw only the old familiar
music-hall look: the look of a house with lights blazing and windows
wide, but nobody and nothing within.
The usualness of it all gave him a sense of ease which his boy’s
enjoyment confirmed. George, lounging on the edge of their box, and
watching the yellow dancer with a clear-eyed interest refreshingly
different from Fortin’s tarnished gaze, George so fresh and cool and
unafraid, seemed to prove that a world which could produce such youths
would never again settle its differences by the bloody madness of war.
Gradually Campton became absorbed in the dancer and began to observe her
with the concentration he brought to bear on any subject that attracted
his brush. He saw that she was more paintable than he could have hoped,
though not in the extravagant dress and attitude he was sure her eminent
admirer would prefer; but rather as a little crouching animal against a
sun-baked wall. He smiled at the struggle he should have when the
question of costume came up.
“Well, I’ll do her, if you like,” he turned to say; and two tears of
senile triumph glittered on the physician’s cheeks.
“To-morrow, then—at two—may I bring her? She leaves as soon as possible
for the south. She lives on sun, heat, radiance....”
“To-morrow—yes,” Campton nodded.
His decision once reached, the whole subject bored him, and in spite of
Fortin’s entreaties he got up and signalled to George.
As they strolled home through the brilliant midnight streets, the boy
said: “Did I hear you tell old Fortin you were going to do his dancer?”
“Yes—why not? She’s very paintable,” said Campton, abruptly shaken out
of his security.
“Beginning to-morrow?”
“Why not?”
“Come, you know—_to-morrow_!” George laughed.
“We’ll see,” his father rejoined, with an obscure sense that if he went
on steadily enough doing his usual job it might somehow divert the
current of events.
On the threshold of the hotel they were waylaid by an elderly man with a
round face and round eyes behind gold eye-glasses. His grey hair was cut
in a fringe over his guileless forehead, and he was dressed in expensive
evening clothes, and shone with soap and shaving; but the anxiety of a
frightened child puckered his innocent brow and twitching cheeks.
“My dear Campton—the very man I’ve been hunting for! You remember
me—your cousin Harvey Mayhew of Utica?”
Campton, with an effort, remembered, and asked what he could do,
inwardly hoping it was not a portrait.
“Oh, the simplest thing in the world. You see, I’m here as a Delegate——”
At Campton’s look of enquiry, Mr. Mayhew interrupted himself to explain:
“To the Peace Congress at The Hague——why, yes: naturally. I landed only
this morning, and find myself in the middle of all this rather foolish
excitement, and unable to make out just how I can reach my destination.
My time is—er—valuable, and it is very unfortunate that all this
commotion should be allowed to interfere with our work. It would be most
annoying if, after having made the effort to break away from Utica, I
should arrive too late for the opening of the Congress.”
Campton looked at him wonderingly. “Then you’re going anyhow?”
“Going? Why not? You surely don’t think——?” Mr. Mayhew threw back his
shoulders, pink and impressive. “I shouldn’t, in any case, allow
anything so opposed to my convictions as _war_ to interfere with my
carrying out my mandate. All I want is to find out the route least
likely to be closed if—if this monstrous thing should happen.”
Campton considered. “Well, if I were you, I should go round by
Luxembourg—it’s longer, but you’ll be out of the way of trouble.” He
gave a nod of encouragement, and the Peace Delegate thanked him
profusely.
Father and son were lodged on the top floor of the Crillon, in the
little apartment which opens on the broad terraced roof. Campton had
wanted to put before his boy one of the city’s most perfect scenes; and
when they reached their sitting-room George went straight out onto the
terrace, and leaning on the parapet, called back: “Oh, don’t go to bed
yet—it’s too jolly.”
Campton followed, and the two stood looking down on the festal expanse
of the Place de la Concorde strown with great flower-clusters of lights
between its pearly distances. The sky was full of stars, pale, remote,
half-drowned in the city’s vast illumination; and the foliage of the
Champs Elysées and the Tuileries made masses of mysterious darkness
behind the statues and the flashing fountains.
For a long time neither father nor son spoke; then Campton said: “Are
you game to start the day after to-morrow?”
George waited a moment. “For Africa?”
“Well—my idea would be to push straight through to the south—as far as
Palermo, say. All this cloudy watery loveliness gives me a furious
appetite for violent red earth and white houses crackling in the glare.”
George again pondered; then he said: “It sounds first-rate. But if
you’re so sure we’re going to start why did you tell Fortin to bring
that girl to-morrow?”
Campton, reddening in the darkness, felt as if his son’s clear eyes were
following the motions of his blood. Had George suspected why he had
wanted to ingratiate himself with the physician?
“It was stupid—I’ll put her off,” he muttered. He dropped into an
armchair, and sat there, in his clumsy infirm attitude, his arms folded
behind his head, while George continued to lean on the parapet.
The boy’s question had put an end to their talk by baring the throbbing
nerve of his father’s anxiety. If war were declared the next day, what
did George mean to do? There was every hope of his obtaining his
discharge; but would he lend himself to the attempt? The deadly fear of
crystallizing his son’s refusal by forcing him to put it into words kept
Campton from asking the question.
IV
The evening was too beautiful, and too full of the sense of fate, for
sleep to be possible, and long after George had finally said “All the
same, I think I’ll turn in,” his father sat on, listening to the gradual
subsidence of the traffic, and watching the night widen above Paris.
As he sat there, discouragement overcame him. His last plan, his plan
for getting George finally and completely over to his side, was going to
fail as all his other plans had failed. If there were war there would be
no more portraits to paint, and his vision of wealth would vanish as
visions of love and happiness and comradeship had one by one faded away.
Nothing had ever succeeded with him but the thing he had in some moods
set least store by, the dogged achievement of his brush; and just as
that was about to assure his happiness, here was this horrible
world-catastrophe threatening to fall across his path.
His misfortune had been that he could neither get on easily with people
nor live without them; could never wholly isolate himself in his art,
nor yet resign himself to any permanent human communion that left it
out, or, worse still, dragged it in irrelevantly. He had tried both
kinds, and on the whole preferred the first. His marriage, his stupid
ill-fated marriage, had after all not been the most disenchanting of his
adventures, because Julia Ambrose, when she married him, had made no
pretense of espousing his art.
He had seen her first in the tumble-down Venetian palace where she lived
with her bachelor uncle, old Horace Ambrose, who dabbled in bric-a-brac
and cultivated a guileless Bohemianism. Campton, looking back, could
still understand why, to a youth fresh from Utica, at odds with his
father, unwilling to go into the family business, and strangling with
violent unexpressed ideas on art and the universe, marriage with Julia
Ambrose had seemed so perfect a solution. She had been brought up abroad
by her parents, a drifting and impecunious American couple; and after
their deaths, within a few months of each other, her education had been
completed, at her uncle’s expense, in a fashionable Parisian convent.
Thence she had been transplanted at nineteen to his Venetian household,
and all the ideas that most terrified and scandalized Campton’s family
were part of the only air she had breathed. She had never intentionally
feigned an exaggerated interest in his ambitions. But her bringing-up
made her regard them as natural; she knew what he was aiming at, though
she had never understood his reasons for trying. The jargon of art was
merely one of her many languages; but she talked it so fluently that he
had taken it for her mother-tongue.
The only other girls he had known well were his sisters—earnest
eye-glassed young women, whose one answer to all his problems was that
he ought to come home. The idea of Europe had always been terrifying to
them, and indeed to his whole family, since the extraordinary
misadventure whereby, as the result of a protracted diligence journey
over bad roads, of a violent thunderstorm, and a delayed steamer,
Campton had been born in Paris instead of Utica. Mrs. Campton the elder
had taken the warning to heart, and never again left her native soil;
but the sisters, safely and properly brought into the world in their own
city and State, had always felt that Campton’s persistent yearnings for
Europe, and his inexplicable detachment from Utica and the Mangle, were
mysteriously due to the accident of their mother’s premature
confinement.
Compared with the admonitions of these domestic censors, Miss Ambrose’s
innocent conversation was as seductive as the tangles of Neæra’s hair,
and it used to be a joke between them (one of the few he had ever been
able to make her see) that he, the raw up-Stater, was Parisian born,
while she, the glass and pattern of worldly knowledge, had seen the
light in the pure atmosphere of Madison Avenue.
Through her, in due course, he came to know another girl, a queer abrupt
young American, already an old maid at twenty-two, and in open revolt
against her family for reasons not unlike his own. Adele Anthony had
come abroad to keep house for a worthless “artistic” brother, who was
preparing to be a sculptor by prolonged sessions in Anglo-American bars
and the lobbies of music-halls. When he finally went under, and was
shipped home, Miss Anthony stayed on in Paris, ashamed, as she told
Campton, to go back and face the righteous triumph of a family
connection who had unanimously disbelieved in the possibility of making
Bill Anthony into a sculptor, and in the wisdom of his sister’s staking
her small means on the venture.
“Somehow, behind it all, I was right, and they were wrong; but to do
anything with poor Bill I ought to have been able to begin two or three
generations back,” she confessed.
Miss Anthony had many friends in Paris, of whom Julia Ambrose was the
most admired; and she had assisted sympathizingly (if not
enthusiastically) at Campton’s wooing of Julia, and their hasty
marriage. Her only note of warning had been the reminder that Julia had
always been poor, and had always lived as if she were rich; and that was
silenced by Campton’s rejoinder that the Magic Mangle, to which the
Campton prosperity was due, was some day going to make him rich, though
he had always lived as if he were poor.
“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 heirs inherited only a series of
law-suits.
John Campton, henceforth, was merely the unsuccessful son of a ruined
manufacturer; painting became a luxury he 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 Julia, 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 hoped 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 taper 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 turban-wise 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 from his _fugue_.
“_Comme je vous comprends!_” she had 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
concierge 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 _maréchal 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 ——.
“He is to take with him provisions for one day.
“He is to present himself at the station of —— on the third day of
mobilisation at 6 o’clock, and to take the train indicated by the
station-master.
“The days of mobilisation are counted from 0 o’clock to 24 o’clock. The
first day is that on which the order of mobilisation is published.”
Campton dropped the book and pressed his hands to his temples. “The days
of mobilisation are counted from 0 o’clock to 24 o’clock. The first day
is that on which the order of mobilisation is published.” Then, if
France mobilised that day, George would start the second day after, at
six in the morning. George might be going to leave him within
forty-eight hours from that very moment!
Campton had always vaguely supposed that, some day or other, if war
came, a telegram would call George to his base; it had never occurred to
him that every detail of the boy’s military life had long since been
regulated by the dread power which had him in its grasp.
He read the next paragraph: “The bearer will travel free of charge——”
and thought with a grin how it would annoy Anderson Brant that the
French government should presume to treat his stepson as if he could not
pay his way. The plump bundle of bank-notes on the dressing-table seemed
to look with ineffectual scorn at the red book that sojourned so
democratically in the same pocket. And Campton, picturing George jammed
into an overcrowded military train, on the plebeian wooden seat of a
third-class compartment, grinned again, forgetful of his own anxiety in
the vision of Brant’s exasperation.
Ah, well, it wasn’t war yet, whatever they said!
He carried the red book back to the dressing-table. The light falling
across the bed drew his eye to the young face on the pillow. George lay
on his side, one arm above his head, the other laxly stretched along the
bed. He had thrown off the blankets, and the sheet, clinging to his
body, modelled his slim flank and legs as he lay in dreamless rest.
For a long time Campton stood gazing; then he stole back to the
sitting-room, picked up a sketch-book and pencil and returned. He knew
there was no danger of waking George, and he began to draw, eagerly but
deliberately, fascinated by the happy accident of the lighting, and of
the boy’s position.
“Like a statue of a young knight I’ve seen somewhere,” he said to
himself, vexed and surprised that he, whose plastic memories were always
so precise, should not remember where; and then his pencil stopped. What
he had really thought was: “Like the _effigy_ of a young knight”—though
he had instinctively changed the word as it formed itself. He leaned in
the doorway, the sketch-book in hand, and continued to gaze at his son.
It was the clinging sheet, no doubt, that gave him that look ... and the
white glare of the electric burner.
If war came, that was just the way a boy might lie on a battle-field-or
afterward in a hospital bed. Not _his_ boy, thank heaven; but very
probably his boy’s friends: hundreds and thousands of boys like his boy,
the age of his boy, with a laugh like his boy’s.... The wicked waste of
it! Well, that was what war meant ... what to-morrow might bring to
millions of parents like himself.
He stiffened his shoulders, and opened the sketch-book again. What
watery stuff was he made of, he wondered? Just because the boy lay as if
he were posing for a tombstone!... What of Signorelli, who had sat at
his dead son’s side and drawn him, tenderly, minutely, while the coffin
waited?
Well, damn Signorelli—that was all! Campton threw down his book, turned
out the sitting-room lights, and limped away to bed.
V
The next morning he said to George, over coffee on the terrace: “I think
I’ll drop in at Cook’s about our tickets.”
George nodded, munching his golden roll.
“Right. I’ll run up to see mother, then.”
His father was silent. Inwardly he was saying to himself: “The chances
are she’ll be going back to Deauville this afternoon.”
There had not been much to gather from the newspapers heaped at their
feet. Austria had ordered general mobilisation; but while the tone of
the despatches was nervous and contradictory that of the leading
articles remained almost ominously reassuring. Campton absorbed the
reassurance without heeding its quality: it was a drug he had to have at
any price.
He expected the Javanese dancer to sit to him that afternoon, but he had
not proposed to George to be present. On the chance that things might
eventually take a wrong turn he meant to say a word to Fortin-Lescluze;
and the presence of his son would have been embarrassing.
“You’ll be back for lunch?” he called to George, who still lounged on
the terrace in pyjamas.
“Rather.—That is, unless mother makes a point ... in case she’s
leaving.”
“Oh, of course,” said Campton with grim cordiality.
“You see, dear old boy, I’ve got to see Uncle Andy some time....” It was
the grotesque name that George, in his babyhood, had given to Mr. Brant,
and when he grew up it had been difficult to substitute another.
“Especially now——” George added, pulling himself up out of his chair.
“Now?”
They looked at each other in silence, irritation in the father’s eye,
indulgent amusement in the son’s.
“Why, if you and I are really off on this long trek——”
“Oh, of course,” agreed Campton, relieved. “You’d much better lunch with
them. I always want you to do what’s decent.” He paused on the threshold
to add: “By the way, don’t forget Adele.”
“Well, rather not,” his son responded. “And we’ll keep the evening free
for something awful.”
As he left the room he heard George rapping on the telephone and calling
out Miss Anthony’s number.
Campton had to have reassurance at any price; and he got it, as usual,
irrationally but irresistibly, through his eyes. The mere fact that the
midsummer sun lay so tenderly on Paris, that the bronze dolphins of the
fountains in the square were spraying the Nereids’ Louis Philippe
chignons as playfully as ever; that the sleepy Cities of France dozed as
heavily on their thrones, and the Horses of Marly pranced as fractiously
on their pedestals; that the glorious central setting of the city lay
there in its usual mellow pomp—all this gave him a sense of security
that no crisscrossing of Reuters and Havases could shake.
Nevertheless, he reflected that there was no use in battling with the
silly hysterical crowd he would be sure to encounter at Cook’s; and
having left word with the hotel-porter to secure two “sleepings” on the
Naples express, he drove to the studio.