Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (18 page)

 
          
Campton’s whole being recoiled from what awaited him.
Since
the poor youth was delirious, what was the use of seeing him? But women took a
morbid pleasure in making one do things that were useless!

 
          
On
an upper floor they paused at a door where there was a moment’s parleying.

 
          
“Come,”
Mrs. Talkett said; “he’s a little better.”

 
          
The
room contained two beds. In one lay a haggard elderly man with closed eyes and
lips drawn back from his clenched teeth. His legs stirred restlessly, and one
of his arms was in a lifted sling attached to a horrible kind of gallows above
the bed. It reminded Campton of Juan de Borgona’s pictures of the Inquisition,
in the Prado.

 
          
“Oh,
he’s all right; he’ll get well. It’s the other…”

 
          
The
other lay quietly in his bed. No gallows overhung
him,
no visible bandaging showed his wound. There was a flush on his young cheeks
and his eyes looked out, large and steady, from their hollow brows. But he was
the one who would not get well.

 
          
Mrs.
Talkett bent over him: her voice was sweet when it was lowered.

 
          
“I’ve
kept my promise. Here he is.”

 
          
The
eyes turned in the lad’s immovable head, and he and Campton looked at each
other. The painter had never seen the face before him: a sharp irregular face,
prematurely hollowed by pain, with thick chestnut hair tumbled above the
forehead.

 
          
“It’s
you, Master!” the boy said.

 
          
Campton
sat down beside him. “How did you know? Have you seen me before?”

 
          
“Once—at one of your exhibitions.”
He paused and drew a hard
breath. “But the first thing was the portrait at the Luxembourg … your son…”

 
          
“Ah,
you look like him!” Campton broke out.

 
          
The
eyes of the young soldier lit up. “Do I? … Someone told me he was your son. I
went home from seeing that and began to paint. After the war, would you let me
come and work with you? My things … wait … I’ll show you my things first.” He
tried to raise himself. Mrs. Talkett slipped her arm under his shoulders, and
resting against her he lifted his hand and pointed to the bare wall facing him.

 
          
“There—there;
you see? Look for yourself.
The brushwork … not too bad, eh?
I was … getting it… There, that heard of my grandfather, eh?
And
my lame sister…
Oh, I’m young …” he smiled … “never had any models… But
after the war you’ll see…”

 
          
Mrs.
Talkett let him down again, and feverishly, vehemently, he began to describe,
one by one, and over and over again, the pictures he saw on the naked wall in
front of him.

 
          
A
nurse had slipped in, and Mrs. Talkett signed to Campton to follow her out. The
boy seemed aware that the painter was going, and interrupted his enumeration to
say: “As soon as the war’s over you’ll let me come?”

 
          
“Of
course I will,” Campton promised.

 
          
In
the passage he asked “Can nothing save him? Has everything possible been done?”

 
          
“Everything.
We’re all so fond of him—the biggest surgeons
have seen him. It seems he had great talent—but he never could afford models,
so he has painted his family over and over again.” Mrs. Talkett looked at
Campton with a good deal of feeling in her changing eyes. “You see, it did
help, your coming. I know you thought it tiresome of me to insist.” She led him
downstairs and into the office, where a lame officer with the Croix de Guerre
sat at the desk. The officer wrote out the young soldier’s name—Rene Davril—and
his family’s address.

 
          
“They’re
quite destitute, Monsieur. An old infirm grandfather, a lame sister who taught
music, a widowed mother and several younger children…”

 
          
“I’ll
come back, I’ll come back,” Campton again promised as he parted from Mrs.
Talkett.

 
          
He
had not thought it possible that he would ever feel
so
kindly toward her as at that moment. And then, a second later, she nearly
spoiled it by saying: “Dear Master—you see the penalty of greatness!”

 
          
The
name of Rene Davril was with Campton all day. The boy had believed in him—his
eyes had been opened by the sight of George’s portrait! And now, in a day or
two more, he would be filling a three-by-six ditch in a crowded graveyard.
At twenty—and with eyes like George’s.

 
          
What
could Campton do? No one was less visited by happy inspirations; the “little
acts of kindness” recommended to his pious infancy had always seemed to him far
harder to think of than to perform. But now some instinct carried him straight
to the corner of his studio where he remembered having shoved out of sight a
half-finished study for George’s portrait. He found it, examined it critically,
scribbled his signature in one corner, and set out with it for the hospital. On
the way he had to stop at the Ministry of War on Mayhew’s tiresome business,
and was delayed there till too late to proceed with his errand before luncheon.
But in the afternoon he passed in again through the revolving plate glass, and
sent up his name. Mrs. Talkett was not there, but a nurse came down, to
whom
, with embarrassment, he explained himself.

 
          
“Poor
little Davril? Yes—he’s still alive. Will you come up? His
family
are
with him.”

 
          
Campton
shook his head and held out the parcel. “It’s a picture he wanted”

 
          
The
nurse promised it should be given. She looked at Campton with a vague
benevolence, having evidently never heard his name; and the painter turned away
with a cowardly sense that he ought to have taken the picture up himself. But
to see the death-change on a face so like his son’s, and its look reflected in
other anguished faces, was more than he could endure. He turned away.

 
          
The
next morning Mrs. Talkett wrote that Rene Davril was better, that the fever had
dropped, and that he was lying quietly looking at the sketch. “The only thing
that troubles him is that he realized now that you have not seen his pictures.
But he is very happy, and blesses you for your goodness.”

 
          
His
goodness! Campton, staring at the letter, could only curse himself for his
stupidity. He saw now that the one thing which might have comforted the poor
lad would have been to have his own pictures seen and judged; and that one
thing, he, Campton, so many years vainly athirst for the approbation of the men
he revered—that one thing he had never thought of doing! The only way of
atoning for his negligence was instantly to go out to the suburb where the
Davril family lived. Campton, without a scruple, abandoned Mr. Mayhew, with
whom he had an appointment at the Embassy and another at the War Office, and
devoted the rest of the day to the expedition. It was after six when he reached
the hospital again; and when Mrs. Talkett came down he went up to her
impetuously.

 
          
“Well—I’ve
seen them; I’ve seen his pictures, and he’s right. They’re astonishing!
Awkward, still, and hesitating; but with such a sense of air and
mass.
He’ll do things—May I go up and tell him?” He broke off and looked
at her.

 
          
“He
died an hour ago. If only you’d seen them yesterday!” she said.

 
          
  

 
          
The
killing of Rene Davril seemed to Campton one of the most senseless crimes the
war had yet perpetrated. It brought home to him, far more vividly than the
distant death of poor Jean Fortin, what an incalculable sum of gifts and
virtues went to make up the monster’s daily meal.

 
          
“Ah,
you want genius, do you? Mere youth’s not enough … and health and gaiety and
courage; you want brains in the bud, imagination and poetry, ideas all folded
up in their sheath! It takes that, does it, to temp your jaded appetite?” He
was reminded of the rich vulgarians who will eat only things out of season.
“That’s what war is like,” he muttered savagely to himself.

 
          
The
next morning he went to the funeral with Mrs. Talkett—between whom and himself
the tragic episode had created a sort of improvised intimacy—walking at her
side through the November rain, behind the poor hearse with the tricolour over
it.

 
          
At
the church, while the few mourners shivered in a damp side chapel, he had time
to study the family: a poor sobbing mother, two anaemic little girls, and the
lame sister who was musical—a piteous group, smelling of poverty and tears.
Behind them, to his surprise, he saw the curly brown head and short-sighted
eyes of Boylston. Campton wondered at the latter’s presence; then he remembered
“The Friends of French Art,” and concluded that the association had probably
been interested in poor Davril.

 
          
With
some difficulty he escaped from the thanks of the mother and sisters, and
picked up a taxi to take Mrs. Talkett home.

 
          
“No—back
to the hospital,” she said. “A lot of bad cases have come in, and I’m on duty
again all day.” She spoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world;
and he shuddered at the serenity with which women endure the unendurable.

 
          
At
the hospital he followed her in. The Davril family, she told him, had insisted
that they had no claim on his picture, and that it must be returned to him.
Mrs. Talkett went up to fetch it; and Campton waited in one of the
drawing-rooms. A step sounded behind him, and another nurse came in—but was it
a nurse, or some haloed nun from an Umbrian triptych, her pure oval framed in
white, her long fingers clasping a book and lily?

 
          
“Mme.
de Dolmetsch!” he cried; and thought: “A new
face
again—what an artist!”

 
          
She
seized his hands.

 
          
“I
heard from dear Madge Talkett that you were here, and I’ve asked her to leave
us together.” She looked at him with ravaged eyes, as if just
risen
from a penitential vigil.

 
          
“Come,
please, into my little office: you didn’t know that I was the Infirmiere-Major?
My dear friend, what upheavals, what cataclysms! I see no one now: all my days
and nights are given to my soldiers.”

 
          
She
glided ahead on noiseless sandals to a little room where a bowl of jade filled
with gardenias, and a tortoise-shell box of gold-tipped cigarettes, stood on a
desk among torn and discoloured livrets militaires. The room was empty, and
Mme. de Dolmetsch, closing the door, drew Campton to a seat at her side. So
close to her, he saw that the perfect lines of her face were flawed by marks of
suffering. “The woman really has a heart,” he thought, “or the war couldn’t
have made her so much handsomer.”

 
          
Mme.
de Dolmetsch leaned closer: a breath of incense floated from her conventual
draperies.

 
          
“I
know why you came,” she continued; “you were good to that poor little Davril.”
She clutched Campton suddenly with a blue-veined hand. “My dear friend, can
anything justify such horrors? Isn’t it abominable that boys like that should
be murdered? That some senile old beast of a diplomatist should decree, after a
good dinner, that all we love best must be offered up?” She caught his hands
again, her liturgical scent enveloping him. “Campton, I know you feel as I do.”
She paused, pressing his fingers hard, her beautiful mouth trembling. “For
God’s sake tell me,” she implored, “how you’ve managed to keep your son from
the front!”