Read Edith Wharton - Novel 14 Online
Authors: A Son at the Front (v2.1)
Edith Wharton - Novel 14
A
Son at the Front.
1923
Contents
Book
I
.
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 maestria 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 type 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 the “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-fund,” 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 Palamedes, 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 maid-servant’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 tomorrow,” 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.”