Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (4 page)

 
          
The
night was so lovely that, though the
Boulogne
express arrived late, George at once
proposed dining in the Bois.

 
          
His
luggage, of which, as usual, there was a good deal, was dropped at the Crillon,
and they shot up the Champs Elysées as the summer dusk began to be pricked by
lamps.

 
          
“How
jolly the old place smells!” George cried, breathing in the scent of sun-warmed
asphalt, of flower-beds and freshly-watered dust. He seemed as much alive to
such impressions as if his first word at the station had not been: “Well, this
time I suppose we’re in for it.” In for it they might be; but meanwhile he
meant to enjoy the scents and scenes of
Paris
as acutely and unconcernedly as ever.

 
          
Campton
had hoped that he would pick out one of the humble cyclists’ restaurants near
the
Seine
; but not he. “Madrid, is it?” he said
gaily, as the taxi turned into the Bois; and there they sat under the
illuminated trees, in the general glitter and expensiveness, with the Tziganes
playing down their talk, and all around them the painted faces that seemed to
the father so old and obvious, and to the son, no doubt, so full of novelty and
mystery.

 
          
The
music made conversation difficult; but Campton did not care. It was enough to
sit and watch the face in which, after each absence, he noted a new and richer
vivacity. He had often tried to make up his mind if his boy were handsome. Not
that the father’s eye influenced the painter’s; but George’s young head, with
its thick blond thatch, the complexion ruddy to the golden eyebrows, and then
abruptly white on the forehead, the short amused nose, the inquisitive eyes,
the ears lying back flat to the skull against curly edges of fair hair, defied
all rules and escaped all classifications by a mixture of romantic gaiety and
shrewd plainness like that in certain eighteenth-century portraits.

 
          
As
father and son faced each other over the piled-up peaches, while the last
sparkle of champagne died down in their glasses, Campton’s thoughts went back
to the day when he had first discovered his son. George was a schoolboy of
twelve, at home for the Christmas holidays. At home meant at the Brants’, since
it was always there he stayed: his father saw him only on certain days. Usually
Mariette fetched him to the studio on one afternoon in the week; but this
particular week George was ill, and it had been arranged that in case of
illness his father was to visit him at his mother’s. He had one of his frequent
bad colds, and Campton recalled him, propped up in bed in his luxurious
overheated room, a scarlet sweater over his nightshirt, a book on his thin
knees, and his ugly little fever-flushed face bent over it in profound
absorption. Till that moment George had never seemed to care for books: his
father had resigned himself to the probability of seeing him grow up into the
ordinary pleasant young fellow, with his mother’s worldly tastes. But the boy
was reading as only a bookworm reads—reading with his very finger-tips, and his
inquisitive nose, and the perpetual dart ahead of a gaze that seemed to guess
each phrase from its last work. He looked up with a smile, and said: “Oh, Dad
…” but it was clear that he regarded the visit as an interruption. Campton,
leaning over, saw that the book was a first edition of Lavengro.

 
          
“Where
the deuce did you get that?”

 
          
George
looked at him with shining eyes. “Didn’t you know? Mr. Brant has started
collecting first editions. There’s a chap who comes over from
London
with things for him. He lets me have them
to look at when I’m seedy. I say, isn’t this topping? Do you remember the
fight?” And, marvelling once more at the ways of
Providence
, Campton perceived that the millionaire’s
taste for owning books had awakened in his stepson a taste for reading them. “I
couldn’t have done that for him,” the father had reflected with secret
bitterness. It was not that a bibliophile’s library was necessary to develop a
taste for letters; but that Campton himself, being a small reader, had few
books about him, and usually borrowed those few. If George had lived with him
he might never have guessed the boy’s latent hunger, for the need of books as
part of one’s daily food would scarcely have presented itself to him.

 
          
From
that day he and George had understood each other. Initiation had come to them
in different ways, but their ardour for beauty had the same root. The visible
world, and its transposition in terms of one art or another, were
thereafter the subject of their interminable talks; and Campton, with a
passionate interest, watched his son absorbing through books what had
mysteriously reached him through his paintbrush.

 
          
They
had been parted often, and for long periods; first by George’s schooling in
England, next by his French military service, begun at eighteen to facilitate
his entry into Harvard; finally, by his sojourn at the University. But whenever
they were together they seemed to make up in the first ten minutes for the
longest separation; and since George had come of age, and been his own master,
he had given his father every moment he could spare.

 
          
His
career at Harvard had been interrupted, after two years, by the symptoms of
tuberculosis which had necessitated his being hurried off to the
Engadine
. He had returned completely cured, and at
his own wish had gone back to Harvard; and having finished his course and taken
his degree, he had now come out to join his father on a long holiday before
entering the New York banking-house of Bullard and Brant.

 
          
Campton,
looking at the boy’s bright head across the lights and flowers, thought how
incredibly stupid it was to sacrifice an hour of such a life to the routine of
money-getting; but he had had that question out with himself once for all, and
was not going to return to it. His own success, if it lasted, would eventually
help him to make George independent; but meanwhile he had no right to interfere
with the boy’s business training. He had hoped that George would develop some
marked talent, some irresistible tendency which would decide his future too
definitely for interference; but George was twenty-five, and no such call had
come to him. Apparently he was fated to be only a delighted spectator and
commentator; to enjoy and interpret, not to create. And Campton knew that this
absence of a special bent, with the strain and absorption it implies, gave the
boy his peculiar charm. The trouble was that it made him the prey of other
people’s plans for him. And now all these plans—Campton’s dreams for the future
as well as the business arrangements which were Mr. Brant’s contribution—might
be wrecked by tomorrow’s news from
Berlin
. The possibility still seemed unthinkable;
but in spite of his incredulity the evil shadow hung on him as he and his son
chatted of political issues.

 
          
George
made no allusion to his own case: his whole attitude was so dispassionate that
his father began to wonder if he had not solved the question by concluding that
he would not pass the medical examination. The tone he took was that the whole
affair, from the point of view of twentieth-century civilization, was too
monstrous an incongruity for something not to put a stop to it at the eleventh
hour. His easy optimism at first stimulated his father, and then began to jar
on him.

 
          
“Dastrey
doesn’t think it can be stopped,” Campton said at length.

 
          
The
boy smiled.

 
          
“Dear
old Dastrey! No, I suppose not.
That after-Sedan generation
have
got the inevitability of war in their bones. They’ve never been
able to get beyond it. Our whole view is different: we’re internationals,
whether we want to be or not.”

 
          
“To
begin with, if by ‘our’ view you mean yours and mine, you and I haven’t a drop
of French blood in us,” his father interposed, “and we can never really know
what the French feel on such matters.”

 
          
George
looked at him affectionately.
“Oh, but I didn’t—I meant ‘we’
in the sense of my generation, of whatever nationality.
I know French
chaps who feel as I do—Louis Dastrey, Paul’s nephew, for one; and lots of
English ones. They don’t believe the world will ever stand for another war.
It’s too stupidly uneconomic, to begin with: I suppose you’ve read Angell? Then
life’s worth too
much,
and nowadays too many millions
of people know it. That’s the way we all feel. Think of everything that
counts—art and science and poetry, and all the rest—going to smash at the nod
of some doddering diplomatist! It was different in old times, when the best of
life, for the immense majority, was never anything but plague, pestilence and
famine. People are too healthy and well-fed now; they’re not going off to die
in a ditch to oblige anybody.”

 
          
Campton
looked away, and his eye, straying over the crowd, lit on the long heavy face
of Fortin-Lescluze, seated with a group of men on the other side of the garden.

 
          
Why
had it never occurred to him before that if there was one being in the world
who could get George discharged it was the great specialist under whose care he
had been?

 
          
“Suppose
war does come,” the father thought, “what if I were to go over and tell him
I’ll paint his dancer?” He stood up and made his way between the tables.

 
          
Fortin-Lescluze
was dining with a party of jaded-looking politicians and journalists. To reach
him Campton had to squeeze past another table, at which a fair worn-looking
lady sat beside a handsome old man with a dazzling mane of white hair and a
Grand Officer’s rosette of the Legion of Honour. Campton bowed, and the lady
whispered something to her companion, who returned a stately vacant salute.
Poor old Beausite, dining alone with his much-wronged and all-forgiving wife,
bowing to the people she told him to bow to, and placidly murmuring: “War—war,”
as he stuck his fork into the peach she had peeled!

 
          
At
Fortin’s table the faces were less placid. The men greeted Campton with a
deference which was not lost on Mme. Beausite, and the painter bent close over
Fortin, embarrassed at the idea that she might overhear him. “If I can make
time for a sketch—will you bring your dancing lady tomorrow?”

 
          
The
physician’s eyes lit up under their puffy lids.

 
          
“My
dear friend—will
I? She’s simply set her heart on it!”
He drew out his watch and added: “But why not tell her the good news yourself?
You told me, I think, you’d never seen her? This is her last night at the
‘Posada,’ and if you’ll jump into my motor we shall be just in time to see her
come on.”

 
          
Campton
beckoned to George, and father and son followed Fortin-Lescluze. None of the
three men, on the way back to
Paris
, made any reference to the war. The
physician asked George a few medical questions, and complimented him on his
look of recovered health; then the talk strayed to studios and theatres, where
Fortin-Lescluze firmly kept it.

 
          
The
last faint rumours of the conflict died out on the threshold of the “Posada.”
It would have been hard to discern, in the crowded audience, any appearance but
that of ordinary pleasure-seekers momentarily stirred by a new sensation.
Collectively, fashionable Paris was already away, at the seashore or in the
mountains, but not a few of its chief ornaments still lingered, as the
procession through Campton’s studio had proved; and others had returned drawn
back by doubts about the future, the desire to be nearer the source of news,
the irresistible French craving for the forum and the market when messengers
are foaming in. The public of the “Posada,” therefore, was still Parisian
enough to flatter the new dancer; and on all the pleasure-tired faces,
belonging to every type of money-getters and amusement-seekers, Campton saw
only the old familiar music-hall: the look of a house with lights blazing and
windows wide, but nobody and nothing within.