Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (37 page)

 
          
The
painter hung back, slightly embarrassed; but Mr. Talkett did not seem in the
least disturbed by his appearance, or by the fact of himself being where he
was. It was evident that on whatever terms George might be with his wife, Mr.
Talkett was determined to shed on him the same impartial beam as on all her
other visitors.

 
          
His
eye-glasses glinted blandly up at Campton. “Now I daresay I am subversive,” he
began, going on with what he had been saying, but in a tone intended to include
the newcomer. “I don’t say I’m not. We are a subversive lot at home, all of
us—you must have noticed
that,
haven’t you, Mr.
Campton?”

 
          
Boylston
emitted a faint growl. “What’s that got to do with it?” he asked.

 
          
Mr.
Talkett’s glasses slanted in his direction.
“Why—everything!
Resistance to the herd-instinct (to borrow one of my wife’s expressions) is
really innate in me. And the idea of giving in now, of sacrificing my
convictions, just because of all this deafening noise about America’s danger
and America’s duties—well, no,” said Mr. Talkett, straightening his glasses,
“Philistinism won’t go down with me, in whatever form it tries to disguise
itself.” Instinctively, he stretched a neat hand toward the tea-cups, as if he
had been rearranging the furniture at one of his wife’s parties.

 
          
“But—but—but”
Boylston stuttered, red with rage.

 
          
George
burst into a laugh. He seemed to take a boyish amusement in the dispute. “Tea,
father?” he suggested, reaching across the tray for a cigarette.

 
          
Talkett
jerked himself to his feet. “Take my chair, now do, Mr. Campton. You’ll be more
comfortable. Here, let me shake up this cushion for you” (“Cushion!” Boylston
interjected scornfully.)
“A light, George?
Now don’t
move!—I don’t say, of course, old chap,” Talkett continued, as he held the
match deferentially to George’s cigarette, “that this sort of talk would be
safe—or advisable—just now in public; subversive talk never is. But when two or
three of the Elect are gathered together—well, your father sees my point, I
know. The Hero,” he nodded at George, “has his job, and the Artist,” with a
slant at Campton, “his. In
Germany
, for instance, as we’re beginning to find
out, the creative minds, the Intelligentsia (to use another of my wife’s
expressions), have been carefully protected from the beginning, given jobs,
vitally important jobs of course, but where their lives were not exposed. The
country needs them too much in other ways; they would probably be wretched
fighters, and they’re of colossal service in their own line.

 
          
Whereas
in France and England” he suddenly seemed to see his chance”Well, look here,
Mr. Campton, I appeal to you, I appeal to the great creative Artist: in any
country but France and England, would a fellow of George’s brains have been
allowed, even at this stage of the war, to chuck an important staff job,
requiring intellect, tact and savoir faire, and try to get himself killed like
any unbaked boy—like your poor cousin Benny Upsher, for instance? Would he?”

 
          
“Yes—in
America
!” shouted Boylston; and Mr. Talkett’s
tallowy cheeks turned pink.

 
          
“George
knows how I feel about these things,” he stammered.

 
          
George
still laughed in his remote impartial way, and Boylston asked with a grin: “Why
don’t you get yourself naturalized—a neutral?”

 
          
Mr.
Talkett’s pinkness deepened. “I have lived too much among Artists” he began;
and George interrupted gaily: “There’s a lot to be said on Talkett’s side too.
Going, Roger? Well, I shall be able to look in on you now in a few days.
Remember me to Madge. Good-bye.”

 
          
Boylston
rose also, and Campton remained alone with his son.

 
          
“Remember
me to Madge!” That was the way in which the modern young man spoke of his
beloved to his beloved’s proprietor. There had not been a shadow of constraint
in George’s tone; and now, glancing at the door which had closed on Mr.
Talkett, he merely said, as if apostrophizing the latter’s neat back: “Poor
devil! He’s torn to pieces with it.”

 
          
“With
what?” asked Campton,
startled.

 
          
“Why,
with Boylston’s Preparedness. Wanting to do the proper thing—and never before
having had to decide between anything more vital than straight or turned-down
collars. It’s playing the very deuce with him.”

 
          
His
eyes grew thoughtful. Was he going to pronounce Mrs. Talkett’s name—at last?
But no; he wandered back to her husband. “Poor little ass! Of course he’ll
decide against.” He shrugged his shoulders. “And Boylston’s just as badly torn
in the other direction.”

 
          
“Boylston?”

 
          
“Yes.
Knowing that he wouldn’t be taken himself, on account of his bad heart and his
blind eyes, and wondering if, in spite of his disabilities, he’s got the right
to preach to all these young chaps here who hang on his words like the gospel.
One of them taunted him with it the other day.”

 
          
“The cur!”

 
          
“Yes.
And ever since, of course, Boylston’s been twice as
fierce,
and overworking himself to calm his frenzy. The men who can’t go are all like
that, when they know it’s their proper work. It isn’t everybody’s billet out
there—I’ve learnt that since I’ve had a look at it—but it would be Boylston’s
if he had the health, and he knows it, and that’s what drives him wild.” George
looked at his father with a smile.
‘You don’t know how I
thank my stars that there weren’t any ‘problems’ for me, but just a plain job
that picked me up by the collar, and dropped me down where I belonged.”
He reached for another cigarette. “Old Adele’s coming presently. Do you suppose
we could rake up some fresh tea?” he asked.

 
          
  

 
          
Coming
out of the unlit rainy March night, it was agreeable but almost startling to
Campton to enter Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room. In the softness of shaded
lamplight, against curtains closely drawn, young women dressed with extravagant
elegance chatted with much-decorated officers in the new “horizon” uniform,
with here and there among them an elderly civilian head, such as Harvey
Mayhew’s silvery thatch and the square rapacious skull of the newly-knighted
patriot, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein.

 
          
Campton
had gone to Mrs. Talkett’s that afternoon because she had lent her apartment to
“The Friends of French Art,” who were giving a concert organized by Miss
Anthony and Mile.
Davril, with Mme. de Dolmetsch’s pianist as
their leading performer.
It would have been ungracious to deprive the
indefatigable group of the lustre they fancied Campton’s presence would confer;
and he was not altogether sorry to be there. He knew that George had promised
Miss Anthony to come; and he wanted to see his son with Mrs. Talkett.

 
          
An
abyss seemed to divide this careless throng of people, so obviously assembled
for their own pleasure, the women to show their clothes, the men to admire
them, from the worn preoccupied audiences of the first war-charity
entertainments. The war still raged; wild hopes had given way to dogged
resignation; each day added to the sum of public anguish and private woe. But
the strain had been too long, the tragedy too awful. The idle and the useless
had reached their emotional limit, and once more they dressed and painted,
smiled, gossiped,
flirted
as though the long agony
were over.

 
          
On
a sofa stacked with orange-velvet cushions Mme. de Dolmetsch reclined in a sort
of serpent-coil of flexible grey-green hung with strange amulets. Her eyes, in
which fabulous islands seemed to dream, were fixed on the bushy-haired young
man at the piano. Close by, upright and tight-waisted, sat the Marquise de
Tranlay, her mourning veil thrown back from a helmet-like hat. She had planted
herself in a Louis Philippe armchair, as if appealing to its sturdy frame to
protect her from the anarchy of Mrs. Talkett’s furniture; and beside her was
the daughter for whose sake she had doubtless come—a frowning beauty who, in
spite of her dowdy dress and ugly boots, somehow declared herself as having
already broken away from the maternal tradition.

 
          
Mme.
de Tranlay’s presence in that drawing-room was characteristic enough. It
meant—how often one heard it nowadays!—that mothers had to take their daughters
wherever there was a chance of their meeting young men, and that such chances
were found only in the few “foreign” houses where, discreetly, almost
clandestinely, entertaining had been resumed. You had to take them there, Mme.
de Tranlay’s look seemed to say, because they had to be married (the sooner the
better in these wild times, with all the old barriers down), and because the
young men were growing so tragically few, and the competition was so fierce,
and because in such emergencies a French mother, whose first thought is always
for her children, must learn to accept, even to seek, propinquities from which
her inmost soul, and all the ancestral souls within her, would normally recoil.

 
          
Campton
remembered her gallant attitude on the day when, under her fresh crape, she had
rebuked Mrs. Brant’s despondency. “But how she hates it here—how she must
loathe sitting next to that woman!” he thought; and just then he saw her turn
toward Mme. de Dolmetsch with a stiff bend from the waist, and heard her say in
her most conciliatory tone: “Your great friend, the rich American,
chère Madame
, the benefactor of
France—we should so like to thank him, Claire and I, for all he is doing for
our country.”

 
          
Beckoned
to by Mme. de Dolmetsch, Mr. Mayhew, all pink and silver and prominent pearl
scarf-pin, bowed before the Tranlay ladies, while the Marquise deeply murmured:
“We are grateful—we shall not forget—” and Mademoiselle de Tranlay, holding him
with her rich gaze, added in fluent English: “Mamma hopes you’ll come to tea on
Sunday—with no one but my uncle the Due de Montlhery—so that we may thank you
better than we can here.”

 
          
“Great women—great women!”
Campton mused. He was still watching
Mme. de Tranlay’s dauntless mask when her glance deserted the gratified Mayhew
to seize on a younger figure. It was that of George, who had just entered. Mme.
de Tranlay, with a quick turn, caught Campton’s eye, greeted him with her
trenchant cordiality, and asked, in a voice like the pounce of talons: “The
young officer who has the Legion of Honour—the one you just nodded to—with
reddish hair and his left arm in a sling? French, I suppose, from his uniform;
and yet? Yes, talking to Mrs. Talkett. Can you tell me?”

 
          
“My
son,” said Campton with satisfaction.

 
          
The
effect was instantaneous, though Mme. de Tranlay kept her radiant steadiness.
“How charming—charming—charming!”
And, after a proper
interval: “But, Claire, my child, we’ve not yet spoken to Mrs. Brant, whom I
see over there.” And she steered her daughter swiftly toward Julia.

 
          
Campton’s
eyes returned to his son. George was still with Mrs. Talkett, but they had only
had time for a word or two before she was called away to seat an important dowager.
In that moment, however, the father noted many things. George, as usual
nowadays, kept his air of guarded kindliness, though the blue of his eyes grew
deeper; but Mrs. Talkett seemed bathed in light. It was such a self-revelation
that Campton’s curiosity was lost in the artist’s abstract joy. “If I could
have painted her like that!” he thought, reminded of having caught Mme. de
Dolmetsch transfigured by fear for her lover; but an instant later he
remembered. “Poor little thing!” he murmured. Mrs. Talkett turned her head, as
if his thought had reached her. “Oh, yes—oh, yes; come and let me tell you all
about it,” her eyes entreated him. But Mayhew and Sir Cyril Jorgenstein were
between them.

 
          
“George!”
Mrs. Brant called; and across the intervening groups Campton saw his son bowing
to the Marquise de Tranlay.