Edith Wharton - Novel 14 Read Free

Dolmetsch and leaned it against the other canvases
along the wall. Then he started clumsily to put the room to rights—without
Mariette he was so helpless—and finally, abandoning the attempt, said to
himself: “I’ll come and wind things up tomorrow.”
                 He
was moving that day from the studio to the Hotel de Crillon, where George was
to join him the next evening. It would be jolly to be with the boy from the
moment he arrived; and, even if Mariette’s departure had not paralyzed his
primitive housekeeping, he could not have made room for his son at the studio.
So, reluctantly, for he loathed luxury and conformity, but joyously, because he
was to be with George, Campton threw some shabby clothes into a shapeless
portmanteau, and prepared to despatch the concierges for a taxicab.
                 He
was hobbling down the stairs when the old woman met him with a telegram. He
tore it open and saw that it was dated Deauville , and was not, as he had feared, from his
son.
                 “Very anxious. Must see you tomorrow. Please come to Avenue Marigny at five without fail. Julia Brant.”
                 “Oh,
damn,” Campton growled, crumpling up the message.
                 The concierges was looking at him with searching eyes.
                 “Is
it war, sir?” she asked, pointing to the bit of blue paper. He supposed she was
thinking of her grandsons.
                 “No—no—nonsense! War?” He smiled into her shrewd old face, every
wrinkle of which seemed full of a deep human experience.
                 “War? Can you imagine anything more absurd? Can you now?
What should you say if they told you war was going to be declared, Mme. Lebel?”
                 She
gave him back his look with profound earnestness; then she spoke in a voice of
sudden resolution. “Why, I should say we don’t want it, sir—I’d have four in it
if it came—but that this sort of thing has got to stop.”
                 Campton
shrugged. “Oh, well—it’s not going to come, so don’t worry. And call me a taxi,
will you? No, no, I’ll carry the bags down myself.”
                   
     
  II.
 
 
                 “But
even if they do mobilise: mobilisation is not war—is it?” Mrs. Anderson Brant
repeated across the teacups.
                 Campton
dragged himself up from the deep armchair he had inadvertently chosen. To
escape from his hostess’s troubled eyes he limped across to the window and
stood gazing out at the thick turf and brilliant flower-borders of the garden
which was so unlike his own. After a moment he turned and glanced about him,
catching the reflection of his heavy figure in a mirror dividing two garlanded
panels. He had not entered Mrs. Brant’s drawing-room for nearly ten years; not
since the period of the interminable discussions about the choice of a school
for George; and in spite of the far graver preoccupations that now weighed on
him, and of the huge menace with which the whole world was echoing, he paused
for an instant to consider the contrast between his clumsy person and that
expensive and irreproachable room.
                 “You’ve
taken away Beausite’s portrait of you,” he said abruptly, looking up at the
chimney-panel, which was filled with the blue and umber bloom of a Fragonard
landscape.
                 A
full-length of Mrs. Anderson Brant by Beausite had been one of Mr. Brant’s
wedding-presents to his bride; a Beausite portrait, at that time, was as much a
part of such marriages as pearls and sables.
                 “Yes. Anderson thought … the dress had grown so dreadfully
old-fashioned,” she explained indifferently; and went on again: “You think it’s
not: don’t you?”
                 What
was the use of telling her what he thought? For years and years he had not done
that—about