Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (5 page)

 
          
The
usualness of it all gave him a sense of ease which his boy’s enjoyment
confirmed. George, lounging on the edge of their box, and watching the yellow
dancer with a clear-eyed interest refreshingly different from Fortin’s
tarnished gaze, George so fresh and cool and unafraid, seemed to prove that a
world which could produce such youths would never again settle its differences
by the bloody madness of war.

 
          
Gradually
Campton became absorbed in the dancer and began to observe her with the
concentration he brought to bear on any subject that attracted his brush. He
saw that she was more paintable than he could have hoped, though not in the
extravagant dress and attitude he was sure her eminent admirer would prefer;
but rather as a little crouching animal against a sun-baked wall. He smiled at
the struggle he should have when the question of costume came up.

 
          
“Well,
I’ll do her, if you like,” he turned to say; and two tears of senile triumph
glittered on the physician’s cheeks.

 
          
“Tomorrow,
then—at two—may I bring her? She leaves as soon as possible for the south. She
lives on sun, heat, radiance…”

 
          
“Tomorrow—yes,”
Campton nodded.

 
          
His
decision once reached, the whole subject bored him, and in spite of Fortin’s
entreaties he got up and signalled to George.

 
          
As
they strolled home through the brilliant
midnight
streets, the boy said: “Did I hear you tell
old Fortin you were going to do his dancer?”

 
          
“Yes—why
not? She’s very paintable,” said Campton, abruptly shaken out of his security.

 
          
“Beginning
tomorrow?”

 
          
“Why not?”

 
          
“Come,
you know—tomorrow/” George laughed.

 
          
“We’ll
see,” his father rejoined, with an obscure sense that if he went on steadily
enough doing his usual job it might somehow divert the current of events.

 
          
On
the threshold of the hotel they were waylaid by an elderly man with a round
face and round eyes behind gold eye-glasses. His grey hair was cut in a fringe
over his guileless forehead, and he was dressed in expensive evening
clothes,
and shone with soap and shaving; but the anxiety of
a frightened child puckered his innocent brow and twitching cheeks.

 
          
“My
dear Campton—the very man I’ve been hunting for! You remember me—your cousin
Harvey Mayhew of
Utica
?”

 
          
Campton,
with an effort, remembered, and asked what he could
do,
inwardly hoping it was not a portrait.

 
          
“Oh, the simplest thing in the world.
You see, I’m here as a
Delegate” At Campton’s look of enquiry, Mr. Mayhew interrupted himself to
explain: “To the Peace Congress at The Haguewhy, yes: naturally. I landed only
this morning, and find myself in the middle of all this rather foolish
excitement, and unable to make out just how I can reach my destination. My time
is—er—valuable, and it is very unfortunate that all this commotion should be
allowed to interfere with our work. It would be most annoying if, after having
made the effort to break away from
Utica
, I should arrive too late for the opening
of the Congress.”

 
          
Campton
looked at him wonderingly. “Then you’re going anyhow?”

 
          
“Going?
Why not? You surely don’t think?” Mr. Mayhew threw back his shoulders, pink and
impressive. “I shouldn’t in any case, allow anything so opposed to my
convictions as war to interfere with my carrying out my mandate. All I want is
to find out the route least likely to be closed ifif this monstrous thing
should happen.”

 
          
Campton
considered. “Well, if I were you, I should go round by
Luxembourg
—it’s longer, but you’ll be out of the way
of trouble.” He gave a nod of encouragement, and the Peace Delegate thanked him
profusely.

 
          
Father
and son were lodged on the top floor of the Crillon, in the little apartment
which opens on the broad terraced roof. Campton had wanted to put before his
boy one of the city’s most perfect scenes; and when they reached their
sitting-room George went straight out onto the terrace, and leaning on the
parapet, called back: “Oh, don’t go to bed yet—it’s too jolly.”

 
          
Campton
followed, and the two stood looking down on the festal expanse of the Place de
la Concorde strewn with great flower-clusters of lights between its pearly
distances. The sky was full of stars, pale, remote, half-drowned in the city’s
vast illumination; and the foliage of the Champs Elysées and the Tuileries made
masses of mysterious darkness behind the statues and the flashing fountains.

 
          
For
a long time neither father nor son spoke; then Campton said: “Are you game to
start the day after tomorrow?”

 
          
George
waited a moment.
“For
Africa
?”

 
          
“Well—my
idea would be to push straight through to the south—as far as
Palermo
, say. All this cloudy watery loveliness
gives me a furious appetite for violent red earth and white houses crackling in
the glare.”

 
          
George
again pondered; then he said: “It sounds first-rate. But if you’re so sure
we’re going to start why
did you
tell Fortin to bring
that girl tomorrow?”

 
          
Campton,
reddening in the darkness, felt as if his son’s clear eyes were following the
motions of his blood. Had George suspected why he had wanted to ingratiate
himself with the physician?

 
          
“It
was stupid—I’ll put her off,” he muttered, He dropped into an armchair, and sat
there, in his clumsy infirm attitude, his arms folded behind his head, while
George continued to lean on the parapet.

 
          
The
boy’s question had put an end to their talk by baring the throbbing nerve of
his father’s anxiety. If war were declared the next day, what did George mean
to do? There was every hope of his obtaining his discharge; but would he lend
himself to the attempt? The deadly fear of crystallizing his son’s refusal by
forcing him to put it into words kept Campton from asking the question.

 
          
  

 
          
The
evening was too beautiful, and too full of the sense of fate, for sleep to be
possible, and long after George had finally said “All the same, I think I’ll
turn in,” his father sat on, listening to the gradual subsidence of the
traffic, and watching the night widen above Paris.

 
          
As
he sat there, discouragement overcame him. His last plan, his plan for getting
George finally and completely over to his side, was going to fail as all his
other plans had failed. If there were war there would be no more portraits to paint,
and his vision of wealth would vanish as visions of love and happiness and
comradeship had one by one faded away. Nothing had ever succeeded with him but
the thing he had in some moods set least store by, the dogged achievement of
his brush; and just as that was about to assure his happiness, here was this
horrible world-catastrophe threatening to fall across his path.

 
          
His
misfortune had been that
he could neither get on easily with
people nor live without them; could never wholly isolate himself in his art,
nor yet resign himself to any permanent human communion that left it out,
or, worse still, dragged it in irrelevantly. He had tried both kinds, and on
the whole preferred the first. His marriage, his stupid ill-fated marriage, had
after all not been the most disenchanting of his adventures, because Julia
Ambrose, when she married him, had made no pretense of espousing his art.

 
          
He
had seen her first in the tumble-down Venetian palace where she lived with her
bachelor uncle, old Horace Ambrose, who dabbled in bric-a-brac and cultivated a
guileless Bohemianism. Campton, looking back, could still understand why, to a
youth fresh from
Utica
, at odds with his father, unwilling to go into the family business, and
strangling with violent unexpressed ideas on art and the universe, marriage
with Julia Ambrose had seemed so perfect a solution. She had been brought up
abroad by her parents, a drifting and impecunious American couple; and after
their deaths, within a few months of each other, her education had been
completed, at her uncle’s expense, in a fashionable Parisian convent. Thence
she had been transplanted at nineteen to his Venetian household, and all the
ideas that most terrified and scandalized Campton’s family were part of the
only air she had breathed. She had never intentionally feigned an exaggerated
interest in his ambitions. But her bringing up made her
regard
them as natural; she knew what he was aiming at, though she had never
understood his reasons for trying. The jargon of art was merely one of her many
languages; but she talked it so fluently that he had taken it for her
mother-tongue.

 
          
The
only other girls he had known well were his sisters—earnest eye-glassed young
women, whose one answer to all his problems was that he ought to come home. The
idea of
Europe
had always been terrifying to them, and
indeed to his whole family, since the extraordinary misadventure whereby, as
the result of a protracted diligence journey over bad roads, of a violent
thunderstorm, and a delayed steamer, Campton had been born in
Paris
instead of
Utica
. Mrs. Campton the elder had taken the
warning to heart, and never again left her native soil; but the sisters, safely
and properly brought into the world in their own city and State, had always
felt that Campton’s persistent yearnings for Europe, and his inexplicable
detachment from Utica and the Mangle, were mysteriously due to the accident of
their mother’s premature confinement.

 
          
Compared
with the admonitions of these domestic censors, Miss Ambrose’s innocent conversation
was as seductive as the tangles of Neaera’s hair, and it used to be a joke
between them (one of the few he had ever been able to make her see) that he,
the raw up-Stater, was Parisian born, while she, the glass and pattern of
worldly knowledge, had seen the light in the pure atmosphere of Madison Avenue.

 
          
Through
her, in due course, he came to know another girl, a queer abrupt young
American, already an old maid at twenty-two, and in open revolt against her
family for reasons not unlike his own. Adele Anthony had come abroad to keep
house for a worthless “artistic” brother, who was preparing to be a sculptor by
prolonged sessions in Anglo-American bars and the lobbies of music-halls. When
he finally went under, and was shipped home, Miss Anthony stayed on in
Paris
, ashamed, as she told Campton, to go back
and face the righteous triumph of a family connection who had unanimously
disbelieved in the possibility of making Bill Anthony into a sculptor, and in
the wisdom of his sister’s staking her small means on the venture.

 
          
“Somehow,
behind it all, I was right, and they were wrong; but to do anything with poor
Bill I ought to have been able to begin two or three generations back,” she
confessed.

 
          
Miss
Anthony had many friends in Paris, of whom Julia Ambrose was the most admired;
and she had assisted sympathizingly (if not enthusiastically) at Campton’s
wooing of Julia, and their hasty marriage. Her only note of warning had been
the reminder that Julia had always been poor, and had always lived as if she
were rich; and that was silenced by Campton’s rejoinder that the Magic Mangle,
to which the Campton prosperity was due, was some day going to make him rich,
though he had always lived as if he were poor.