Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (27 page)

 
          
At
first Campton was steeped in the mere sensual joy of his art; but after a few
days the play of the mirrors began to interest him. Mrs. Talkett had abandoned
her hospital work, and was trying, as she said, to “recreate herself.” In this
she was aided by a number of people who struck Campton as rather too young not
to have found some other job, or too old to care any longer for that particular
one. But all this did not trouble his newly recovered serenity. He seemed to
himself, somehow, like a drowned body—but drowned in a toy aquarium—still
staring about with living eyes, but aware of the other people only as shapes
swimming by with a flash of exotic fins. They were enclosed together, all of
them, in an unreal luminous sphere, mercifully screened against the reality
from which a common impulse of horror had driven them; and since he was among
them it was not his business to wonder at the others. So, through the cloud of
his art, he looked out on them impartially.

 
          
The
high priestess of the group was Mme. de Dolmetsch, with Harvey Mayhew as her
acolyte. Mr. Mayhew was still in pursuit of Atrocities: he was in fact almost
the only member of the group who did not rather ostentatiously disavow the
obligation to “carry on.” But he had discovered that to discharge this sacred
task he must vary it by frequent intervals of relaxation. He explained to
Campton that he had found it to be “his duty to rest”; and he was indefatigable
in the performance of duty. He had therefore, with an expenditure of eloquence
which Campton thought surprisingly slight, persuaded Boylston to become his
understudy, and devote several hours a day to the whirling activities of the
shrimp-pink Bureau of Atrocities at the Nouveau Luxe. Campton, at first, could
not understand how the astute Boylston had allowed himself to be drawn into the
eddy; but it turned out that Boylston’s astuteness had drawn him in. “You see,
there’s an awful lot of money to be got out of it, one way and another, and I
know a use for every penny—that it, Miss Anthony and I do,” the young man
modestly explained; adding, in response to the painter’s puzzled stare, that
Mr. Mayhew’s harrowing appeals were beginning to bring from America immense
sums for the Victims, and that Mr. Mayhew, while immensely gratified by the effect
of his eloquence, and the prestige it was bringing him in French social and
governmental circles, had not the cloudiest notion how the funds should be
used, and had begged Boylston to advise him. It was owing to this that the
ex-Delegate to
the
Hague
was able, with a light conscience, to seek the repose of Mrs. Talkett’s
company and, with a smile of the widest initiation, to listen to the subversive
conversation of her familiars.

 
          
“Subversive”
was the motto of the group. Every one was engaged in attacking some theory of
art or life or letters which nobody in particular defended. Even Mr. Talkett—a
kindly young man with eyeglasses and glossy hair, who roamed about
straightening the furniture, like a gentlemanly detective watching the presents
at a wedding—owned to Campton that he was subversive; and on the painter’s
pressing for a definition, added: “Why, I don’t believe in anything she doesn’t
believe in,” while his eye-glasses shyly followed his wife’s course among the
teacups.

 
          
Mme.
de Dolmetsch, though obviously anxious to retain her hold on Mr. Mayhew, did
not restrict herself to such mild fare, but exercised her matchless eyes on a
troop of followers: the shock-haired pianist who accompanied her recitations, a
straight-backed young American diplomatist whose collars seemed a part of his
career, a lustrous South American millionaire, and a short squat Sicilian who
designed the costumes for the pianist’s unproduced ballets.

 
          
All
these people appeared to believe intensely in each other’s reality and importance;
but it gradually came over Campton that all of them, excepting their host and
hostess, knew that they were merely masquerading.

 
          
To
Campton, used to the hard-working world of art, this playing at Bohemia seemed
a nursery-game; but the scene acquired an unexpected solidity from the
appearance in it, one day, of the banker Jorgenstein, who strolled in as
naturally as if he had been dropping into Campton’s studio to enquire into the
progress of his own portrait.

 
          
“I
must come and look you up, Campton—get you to finish me,” he said jovially,
tapping his fat boot with a malacca stick as he looked over the painter’s head
at the canvas on which Mrs. Talkett’s restless image seemed to flutter like a
butterfly impaled.

 
          
“You’ll
owe it to me if he does you,” the sitter declared, smiling back at the leer
which Campton divined behind his shoulder; and he felt a sudden pity for her
innocence.

 
          
“My
wife made Campton come back to his real work—doing his bit, you know,” said Mr.
Talkett, straightening a curtain and disappearing again, like a diving animal;
and Mrs. Talkett turned her plaintive eyes on Campton. “That kind of idiocy is
all I’ve ever had,” they seemed to say; and he nearly cried back to her: “But,
you poor child, it’s the only honest thing anywhere near you!”

 
          
Absorbed
in his picture, he hardly stopped to wonder at Jorgenstein’s reappearance, at
his air of bloated satisfaction or his easy allusions to Cabinet Ministers and
eminent statesmen. The atmosphere of the Talkett house was so mirage-like that
even the big red bulk of the international financier became imponderable in it.

 
          
But
one day Campton, on his way home, ran across Dastrey, and remembered that they
had not met for weeks. The ministerial drudge looked worn and preoccupied, and
Campton was abruptly recalled to the world he had been trying to escape from.

 
          
“You
seem rather knocked-up—what’s wrong with you?”

 
          
Dastrey
stared.
“Wrong with me?
Well—did you like the
communique this morning?”

 
          
“I
didn’t read it,” said Campton curtly. They walked along a few steps in silence.

 
          
“You
see,” the painter continued, “I’ve gone back to my job—my painting. I suddenly
found I had to.”

 
          
Dastrey
glanced at him with surprising kindness. “Ah, that’s good news, my dear
fellow!”

 
          
“You
think so?”
Campton half-sneered.

 
          
“Of course—why not?
What are you painting? May I come and
see?”

 
          
“Naturally.”
Campton paused. “The fact is
,
I was bitten the other day with a desire to depict that little will-o’-the-wisp
of a Mrs. Talkett. Come to her house any afternoon and I’ll show you the
thing.”

 
          
“To her house?”
Dastrey paused with a frown. “Then the
picture’s finished?”

 
          
“No—not by a long way.
I’m doing it there—in her
milieu
, among her crowd. It amuses me;
they amuse me. When will you come?” He shot out the sentences like challenges;
and his friend took them up in the same tone.

 
          
“To Mrs. Talkett’s—to meet her crowd?
Thanks—I’m too much
tied down by my job.”

 
          
“No;
you’re not. You’re too disapproving,” said Campton quarrelsomely. “You think
we’re all a lot of shirks, of drones, of international loafers—I don’t know
what you call us. But I’m one of them, so whatever name you give them I must
answer to. Well, I’ll tell you what they are, my dear fellow—and I’m not
ashamed to be among them: they’re people who’ve resolutely, unanimously,
unshakeably decided, for a certain number of hours each day, to forget the war,
to ignore it, to live as if it were not and never had been, so that”

 
          
“So that?”

 
          
“So that beauty shall not perish from the earth!”
Campton
shouted, bringing his stick down with a whack on the pavement.

 
          
Dastrey
broke into a laugh.
“Allons done!
Decided to forget
the war? Why, bless your heart, they’ve never, not one of ’em, ever been able
to remember it for an hour together; no, not from the first day, except as it
interfered with their plans or cut down their amusements or increased their
fortunes. You’re the only one of them, my dear chap, (since you class yourself
among them) of whom what you’ve just said is true; and if you can forget the
war while you’re at your work, so much the better for you and for us and for
posterity; and I hope you’ll paint all Mrs. Talkett’s crowd, one after another.
Though I doubt if they’re as good subjects now as when you caught them last
July with the war-funk on.” He held out his hand with a dry smile. “Good-bye.
I’m off to meet my nephew, who’s here on leave.”

 
          
He
hastened away, leaving Campton in a crumbled world.
Louis
Dastrey on leave?
But that was because he was at the front, the real
front, in the trenches, had already had a slight wound and a fine citation.
Staff-officers, as George had wisely felt, were not asking for leave just yet…

 
          
The
thoughts excited by this encounter left Campton more than ever resolved to drug
himself
with work and frivolity. It was none of his business
to pry into the consciences of the people about him, not even into
Jorgenstein’s—into which one would presumably have had to be let down in a
diver’s suit, with oxygen pumping at top pressure. If the government tolerated
Jorgenstein’s presence in
France
, probably on the ground that he could be
useful—so the banker himself let it be known—it was silly of people like Adele
Anthony and Dastrey to wince at the mere mention of his name. There woke in
Campton all the old spirit of aimless random defiance—revolt for revolt’s
sake—which had marked the first period of his life after his separation from
his wife. He had long since come to regard it as a crude and juvenile phase—yet
here he was reliving it.

 
          
Though
he knew of the intimacy between Mrs. Talkett and the Brants he had no fear of
meeting Julia: it was impossible to picture her neat head battling with the
blasts of that dishevelled drawing-room. But though she did not appear there,
he heard her more and more often alluded to, in terms of startling familiarity,
by Mrs. Talkett’s visitors. It was clear that they all saw her, chiefly in her
own house, that they thought her, according to their respective vocabularies,
“a perfect dear,”
“une femme exquise”
or
“une bonne vieille”
(ah, poor
Julia!); and that their sudden enthusiasm for her was not uninspired by the
fact that she had got her marvellous
chef
demobilised, and was giving little “war-dinners” followed by a quiet turn at
bridge.

 
          
Campton
remembered Mme. de Tranlay’s rebuke to Mrs. Brant on the day when he had last
called in the Avenue Marigny; then he remembered also that it was on that very
day that he had returned to his painting.

 
          
“After
all, she held out longer than I did—poor Julia!” he mused, annoyed at the idea
of her being the complacent victim of all the voracities he saw about him, and
yet reflecting that she was at last living her life, as they called it at Mrs.
Talkett’s. After all, the fact that George was not at the front seemed to
exonerate his parents—unless, indeed, it did just the opposite.

 
          
One day, coming earlier than usual to Mrs. Talkett’s to put in a
last afternoon’s work on her portrait, Campton, to his surprise, found his wife
in front of it.
Equally to his surprise he noticed that she was dressed
with a juvenility quite new to her; and for the first time he thought she
looked old-fashioned and also old. She met him with her usual embarrassment.

 
          
“I
didn’t know you came as early as this. Madge told me I might just run in” She
waved her hand toward the portrait.

 
          
“I
hope you like it,” he said, suddenly finding that he didn’t.

 
          
“It’s
marvellous—marvellous.” She looked at him timidly. “It’s extraordinary, how
you’ve caught her rhythm, her tempo,” she ventured in the jargon of the place.
Campton, to hide a smile, turned away to get his brushes. “I’m so glad,” she
continued hastily, “that you’ve begun to paint again. We all need to … to …”