Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (38 page)

 
          
Mme.
de Dolmetsch jumped up, her bracelets jangling like a prompter’s call.
“Silence!” she cried. The ladies squeezed into their seats, the men resigned
themselves to door-posts and window-embrasures, and the pianist attacked
Stravinsky…

 
          
“Dancing?”
Campton heard his hostess answering some one. “N—no: not quite yet, I think.
Though in
London
, already … oh, just for the officers on
leave, of course. Poor darlings—why shouldn’t they? But today, you see, it’s
for a charity.” Her smile appealed to her hearer to acknowledge the
distinction.

 
          
The
music was over, and scanning the groups at the tea-tables, Campton saw Adele
and Mile. Davril squeezed away in the remotest corner of the room. He took a
chair at their table, and Boylston presently blinked his way to them through
the crowd.

 
          
They
seemed,
all four, more like unauthorized intruders on
the brilliant scene than its laborious organizers. The entertainment, escaping
from their control, had speedily reverted to its true purpose of feeding and
amusing a crowd of bored and restless people; and the little group recognized
the fact, and joked over it in their different ways.
But
Mile.
Davril was happy at the sale of tickets, which must have been
immense to judge from the crowd (spying about the entrance, she had seen
furious fine ladies turn away ticketless); and Adele Anthony was exhilarated by
the nearness of people she did not know, or wish to know, but with whose names
and private histories she was minutely and passionately familiar.

 
          
“That’s
the old Duchesse de Murols with Mrs. Talkett—there, she’s put her at the
Beausites’ table! Well, of all places! Ah, but you’re all too young to know
about Beausite’s early history. And now, of course, it makes no earthly
difference to anybody. But there must be times when Mme. Beausite remembers,
and grins. Now that she’s begun to rouge again she looks twenty years younger
than the Duchess.

 
          
Ah,”
she broke off, abruptly signing to Campton.

 
          
He
followed her glance to a table at which Julia Brant was seating herself with
the Tranlay ladies and George. Mayhew joined them nobly deferential, and the
elder ladies lent him their intensest attention, isolating George with the
young girl.

 
          
“H’m,”
Adele murmured, “not such a bad thing! They say the girl will have half of old
Montlhery’s money—he’s her mother’s uncle. And she’s heaps handsomer than the
other—not that that seems to count any more!”

 
          
Campton
shrugged the subject away. Yes; it would be a good thing if George could be
drawn from what his mother (with a retrospective pinching of the lips) called
his “wretched infatuation.” But the idea that the boy might be coaxed into a
marriage—and a rich marriage—by the Brants, was even more distasteful to
Campton. If he really loved Madge Talkett better stick to her than let himself
be
cajoled away for such reasons.

 
          
As
the second part of the programme began, Campton and Boylston slipped out
together. Campton was oppressed and disturbed. “It’s queer,” he said, taking
Boylston’s arm to steer him through the dense darkness of the streets; “all
these people who’ve forgotten the war have suddenly made me remember it.”

 
          
Boylston
laughed. “Yes, I know.” He seemed preoccupied and communicative, and the
painter fancied he was going to lead the talk, as usual, to Preparedness and
America
’s intervention; but after a pause he said:
‘You haven’t been much at the office lately”

 
          
“No,”
Campton interrupted. “I’ve shirked abominably since George got back. But now
that he’s gone to the Brants’ you’ll see”

 
          
“Oh,
I didn’t mean it as a reproach, sir! How could you think it? We’re running
smoothly enough, as far as organization goes. That’s not what bothers me”

 
          
“You’re
bothered?”

 
          
Yes;
he was—and so, he added, was Miss Anthony. The trouble was, he went on to
explain, that Mr. Mayhew, after months of total indifference (except when asked
to “represent” them on official platforms) had developed a disquieting interest
in “The Friends of French Art.” He had brought them, in the beginning, a certain
amount of money (none of which came out of his own pocket), and in consequence
had been imprudently put on the Financial Committee, so that he had a voice in
the disposal of funds, though till lately he had never made it heard. But now,
apparently, “Atrocities” were losing their novelty, and he was disposed to
transfer his whole attention to “The Friends of French Art,” with results which
seemed incomprehensibly disturbing to Boylston, until he let drop the name of
Mme. de Dolmetsch. Campton exclaimed at it.

 
          
“Well—yes.
You must have noticed that she and Mr. Mayhew have been getting pretty chummy.
You see, he’s done such a lot of talking that people think he’s at least an Oil
King; and Mme. de Dolmetsch is dazzled. But she’s got her musical prodigy to
provide for” and Boylston outlined the situation which his astuteness had
detected while it developed unperceived under Campton’s dreaming eyes. Mr.
Mayhew was attending all their meetings now, finding fault, criticizing, asking
to have the account investigated, though they had always been audited at
regular intervals by expert accountants; and all this zeal originated in the
desire to put Mme. de Dolmetsch in Miss Anthony’s place, on the plea that her
greater social experience, her gift of attracting and interesting, would bring
in immense sums of money—whereas, Boylston grimly hinted, they already had a
large balance in the bank, and it was with an eye to that balance that Mme. de
Dolmetsch was forcing Mayhew to press her claim.

 
          
“You
see, sir, Mr. Mayhew never turns out to be as liberal as they expect when they
first hear him talk; and though Mme. de Dolmetsch has him in her noose she’s
not getting what she wants—by a long way. And so they’ve cooked this up between
them—she and Mme. Beausite—without his actually knowing what they’re after.”

 
          
Campton
stopped short, releasing Boylston’s arm. “But what you suggest is abominable,”
he exclaimed.

 
          
“Yes.
I know it.” But the young man’s voice remained steady. “Well, I wish you’d come
to our meetings, now you’re back.”

 
          
“I
will—I will! But I’m no earthly use on financial questions. You’re much
stronger there.”

 
          
He
felt Boylston’s grin through the darkness. “Oh, they’ll have me out too before
long.”

 
          
‘You?
Nonsense! What do you mean?”

 
          
“I
mean that lots of people are beginning to speculate in war charities—oh, in all
sorts of ways. Sometimes I’m sick to the point of chucking it all. But Miss
Anthony keeps me going.”

 
          
“Ah,
she would!” Campton agreed.

 
          
As
he walked home his mind was burdened with Boylston’s warning. It was not merely
the affair itself, but all it symbolized, that made his gorge rise, made him,
as Boylston said, sick to the point of wanting to chuck it all—to chuck
everything connected with this hideous world that was dancing and flirting and
money-making on the great red mounds of dead. He grinned at the thought that he
had once believed in the regenerative power of war—the salutary shock of great
moral and social upheavals. Yet he had believed in it, and never more intensely
than at George’s bedside at Doullens, in that air so cleansed by passion and
pain that mere living seemed a meaningless gesture compared to the chosen
surrender of life. But in the
Paris
to which he had returned after barely four
months of absence the instinct of self-preservation seemed to have wiped all
meaning from such words. Poor fatuous Mayhew dancing to Mme. de Dolmetsch’s
piping, Jorgenstein sinking under the weight of his international honours, Mme.
de Tranlay intriguing to push her daughter in such society, and Julia placidly
abetting her—Campton hardly knew from which of these sorry visions he turned
with a completer loathing…

 
          
There
were still the others, to be sure, the huge obscure majority; out there in the
night, the millions giving their lives for this handful of trivial puppets, and
here in Paris, and everywhere, in every country, men and women toiling
unweariedly to help and heal; but in Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room both fighters
and toilers seemed to count as little in relation to the merry-makers as Miss
Anthony and Mile.
Davril in relation to the brilliant people
who had crowded their table into the obscurest corner of the room.

 
          
  

 
          
These
thoughts continued to weigh on Campton; to shake them off he decided, with one
of his habitual quick jerks of resolution, to get back to work. He knew that
George would approve, and would perhaps be oftener with him if he had something
interesting on his easel. Sir Cyril Jorgenstein had suggested that he would
like to have his portrait finished—with the Legion of Honour added to his
lapel, no doubt. And Harvey Mayhew, rosy and embarrassed, had dropped in to
hint that, if Campton could find time to do a charcoal head—oh, just one of
those brilliant sketches of his—of the young musical genius in whose career
their friend Mme. de Dolmetsch was so much interested… But Campton had cut them
both short. He was not working—he had no plans for the present. And in truth he
had not thought even of attempting a portrait of George. The impulse had come
to him, once, as he sat by the boy’s bed; but the face was too
incomprehensible. He should have to learn and unlearn too many things first——

 
          
At
last, one day, it occurred to him to make a study of Mme. Lebel. He saw her in
charcoal: her simple unquestioning anguish had turned her old face to
sculpture. Campton set his canvas on the easel, and started to shout for her
down the stairs; but as he opened the door he found himself face to face with
Mrs. Talkett.

 
          
“Oh,”
she began at once, in her breathless way, “you’re here? The old woman
downstairs wasn’t sure—and I couldn’t leave all this money with her, could I?”

 
          
“Money?
What money?” he echoed.

 
          
She
was very simply dressed, and a veil, drooping low from her hatbrim, gave to her
over-eager face a shadowy youthful calm.

 
          
“I
may come in?” she questioned, almost timidly; and as Campton let her pass she
added: “The money from the concert, of course—heaps and heaps of it! I’d no
idea we’d made so much. And I wanted to give it to you myself.”

 
          
She
shook a bulging bag out of her immense muff, while Campton continued to stare
at her.

 
          
“I
didn’t know you went out so early,” he finally stammered, trying to push a
newspaper over the disordered remains of his breakfast.

 
          
She
lifted interrogative eye-brows. “That means that I’m in the way?”

 
          
“No.
But why did you bring that money here?”

 
          
She
looked surprised.
“Why not?
Aren’t you the head—the
real head of the committee? And wasn’t the concert given in my house?” Her eyes
rested on him with renewed timidity. “Is it—disagreeable to you to see me?” she
asked.

 
          
“Disagreeable?
My dear child, no.”
He paused, increasingly
embarrassed. What did she expect him to say next? To thank her for having sent
him the orderly’s
letter
? It seemed to him impossible
to plunge into the subject uninvited. Surely it was for her to give him the
opening, if she wished to.

 
          
“Well,
no!” she broke out. “I’ve never once pretended to you, have I? The money’s a
pretext. I wanted to see you—here, alone, with no one to disturb us.”

 
          
Campton
felt a confused stirring of relief and fear.
All his old
dread of scenes, commotions, disturbing emergencies—of anything that should
upset his perpetually vibrating balance—was blent with the passionate desire to
hear what his visitor had to say.

 
          
“You—it
was good of you to think of sending us that letter,” he faltered.

 
          
She
frowned in her anxious way and looked away from him. “Afterward I was afraid
you’d be angry.”

 
          
“Angry?
How could I?” He groped for a word.
“Surprised—yes.
I
knew nothing … about you
and .
..”

 
          
“Not even that it was I who bought the sketch of him—the one that
Leonce Black sold for you last year?”

 
          
The
blood rushed to Campton’s face. Suddenly he felt himself trapped and betrayed.
“You—you?
You’ve got that sketch?” The thought was somehow
intolerable to him.

 
          
“Ah,
now you are angry,” Mrs. Talkett murmured.

 
          
“No,
no; but I never imagined”

 
          
“I
know. That was what frightened me—
your
suspecting
nothing.” She glanced about her, dropped to a corner of the divan, and tossed
off her hat with the old familiar gesture. “Oh, can I talk to you?” she
pleaded.

 
          
Campton
nodded.

 
          
“I
wish you’d light your pipe, then, and sit down too.” He reached for his pipe,
struck a match, and slowly seated himself. “You always smoke a pipe in the
morning, don’t you? He told me that,” she went on; then she paused again and
drew a long anxious breath. “Oh, he’s so changed! I feel as if I didn’t know
him any longer—do you?”

 
          
Campton
looked at her with deepening wonder. This was more surprising than discovering
her to be the possessor of the picture; he had not expected deep to call unto
deep in their talk. “I’m not sure that I do,” he confessed.

 
          
Her
fidgeting eyes deepened and grew quieter. “Your saying so makes me feel less
lonely,” she sighed, half to herself. “But has he told you nothing since he
came back—really nothing?”

 
          
“Nothing.
After all—how could he? I mean, without
indiscretion?”

 
          
“Indiscretion?
Oh” She shrugged the word away with half a
smile, as though such considerations belonged to a prehistoric order of things.
“Then he hasn’t even told you that he wants me to get a divorce?”

 
          
“A divorce?”
Campton exclaimed. He sat staring at her as if
the weight of his gaze might pin her down, keep her from fluttering away and
breaking up into luminous splinters. George wanted her to get a divorce—wanted,
therefore, to marry her! His passion went as deep for her as that—too deep,
Campton conjectured, for the poor little ephemeral creature, who struck him as
wriggling on it like a butterfly impaled.

 
          
“Please
tell me,” he said at length; and suddenly, in short inconsequent sentences, the
confession poured from her.

 
          
George,
it seemed, during the previous winter in New York, when they had seen so much
of each other, had been deeply attracted, had wanted “everything,” and at
once—and there had been moments of tension and estrangement, when she had been
held back by scruples she confessed she no longer understood (inherited prejudices,
she supposed), and when her reluctance must have made her appear to be
trifling, whereas, really it was just that she couldn’t … couldn’t… So they had
gone on for several months, with the usual emotional ups-and-downs, till he had
left for
Europe
to join his father; and when they had
parted she had given him the half-promise that if they met abroad during the
summer she would perhaps … after all …

 
          
Then
came
the war. George had been with her during those
few last hours in
Paris
, and had dined with her and her husband (had Campton forgiven her?) the
night before he was mobilised. And then, when he was gone, she had understood
that only timidity, vanity, the phantom barriers of old terrors and traditions,
had prevented her being to him all that he wanted…

 
          
She
broke off abruptly, put in a few conventional words about an ill-assorted
marriage, and never having been “really understood,” and then, as if guessing
that she was on the wrong tack, jumped up, walked to the other end of the
studio, and turned back to Campton with the tears running down her ravaged
face.

 
          
“And
now—and now—he says he won’t have me!” she lamented.

 
          
“Won’t
have you? But you tell me he wants you to be divorced.”

 
          
She
nodded, wiped away the tears, and in so doing stole an unconscious glance at
the mirror above the divan. Then, seeing that the glance was detected, she
burst into a sort of sobbing laugh. “My nose gets so dreadfully red when I
cry,” she stammered.

 
          
Campton
took no notice, and she went on: “A divorce? Yes. And unless I do—unless I
agree to marry him—we’re never to be anything but friends.”

 
          
“That’s
what he says?”

 
          
“Yes.
Oh, we’ve been all in and out of it a hundred times.”

 
          
She
pulled out a gold-mesh bag and furtively restored her complexion, as Mrs. Brant
had once done in the same place.

 
          
Campton
sat still, considering. He had let his pipe go out. Nothing could have been
farther from the revelation he had expected, and his own perplexity was hardly
less great than his visitor’s. Certainly it was not the way in which young men
had behaved in his day—nor, evidently, had it been George’s before the war.

 
          
Finally,
he made up his mind to put the question: “And Talkett?”

 
          
She
burst out at once: “Ah, that’s what I say—it’s not so simple!”

 
          
“What
isn’t?”

 
          
“Breaking up—all one’s life.”
She paused with a deepening
embarrassment. “Of course Roger has made me utterly miserable—but then I know
he really hasn’t meant to.”

 
          
“Have
you told George that?”

 
          
‘Yes.
But he says we must first of all be above-board. He says he sees everything
differently now. That’s what I mean when I say that I don’t understand him. He
says love’s not the same kind of feeling to him that it was. There’s something
of Meredith’s that he quotes—I wish I could remember it—something about a
mortal lease.”

 
          
“Good
Lord,” Campton groaned, not so much at the hopelessness of the case as at the
hopelessness of quoting Meredith to her. After a while he said abruptly: “You
must forgive my asking: but things change sometimes—they change imperceptibly.
Do you think he’s as much in love with you as ever?”

 
          
He
had been half afraid of offending her: but she appeared to consider the
question impartially, and without a shadow of resentment. “Sometimes I think
more—because in the beginning it wasn’t meant to last.
And
now—if he wants to marry me?
Oh, I wish I knew what to do!”

 
          
Campton
continued to ponder. “There’s one more question, since we’re talking frankly:
what does Talkett know of all this?”

 
          
She
looked frightened.
“Oh, nothing, nothing!”

 
          
“And
you’ve no idea how he would take it?”

 
          
She
examined the question with tortured eye-brows, and at length, to Campton’s
astonishment, brought out: “Magnificently”

 
          
“He’d
be generous, you mean? But it would go hard with him?”

 
          
“Oh, dreadfully, dreadfully!”
She seemed to need the
assurance to restore her shaken self-approval.

 
          
Campton
rose with a movement of pity and laid his hand on her shoulder. “My dear
child, if your husband cares for you, give
up my son.”

 
          
Her
face fell, and she drew back. “Oh, but you don’t understand—not in the least!
It’s not possible—it’s not moral. You know I’m all for the new morality. First
of all, we must be true to self.” She paused, and then broke out: ‘You tell me
to give him up because you think he’s tired of me. But he’s not—I know he’s
not! It’s his ideas that you don’t understand, any more than I do. It’s the war
that has changed him. He says he wants only things that last—that are
permanent—things that hold a man fast. That sometimes he feels as if he were
being swept away on a flood, and were trying to catch at things—at anything—as
he’s rushed along under the waves… He says he wants quiet, monotony … to be
sure the same things will happen every day. When we go out together he
sometimes stands for a quarter of an hour and stares at the same building, or
at the
Seine
under the bridges. But he’s happy, I’m
sure… I’ve never seen him
happier ..
.
only
it’s in a way I can’t make out…”