# A Son at the Front/Chapter 29

XXIX
Coming out of the unlit rainy March night, it was agreeable but almost startling to Campton to enter Mrs. Talkett's drawing-room. In the softness of shaded lamplight, against curtains closely drawn, young women dressed with extravagant elegance chatted with much-decorated officers in the new "horizon" uniform, with here and there among them an elderly civilian head, such as Harvey Mayhew's silvery ​thatch and the square rapacious skull of the newly-knighted patriot, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein.
Campton had gone to Mrs. Talkett's that afternoon because she had lent her apartment to "The Friends of French Art," who were giving a concert organized by Miss Anthony and Mlle. Davril, with Mme. de Dolmetsch's pianist as their leading performer. It would have been ungracious to deprive the indefatigable group of the lustre they fancied Campton's presence would confer; and he was not altogether sorry to be there. He knew that George had promised Miss Anthony to come; and he wanted to see his son with Mrs. Talkett.
An abyss seemed to divide this careless throng of people, so obviously assembled for their own pleasure, the women to show their clothes, the men to admire them, from the worn preoccupied audiences of the first war-charity entertainments. The war still raged; wild hopes had given way to dogged resignation; each day added to the sum of public anguish and private woe. But the strain had been too long, the tragedy too awful. The idle and the useless had reached their emotional limit, and once more they dressed and painted, smiled, gossiped, flirted as though the long agony were over.
On a sofa stacked with orange-velvet cushions Mme. de Dolmetsch reclined in a sort of serpent-coil of flexible grey-green hung with strange amulets. Her eyes, ​in which fabulous islands seemed to dream, were fixed on the bushy-haired young man at the piano. Close by, upright and tight-waisted, sat the Marquise de Tranlay, her mourning veil thrown back from a helmet-like hat. She had planted herself in a Louis Philippe armchair, as if appealing to its sturdy frame to protect her from the anarchy of Mrs. Talkett's furniture; and beside her was the daughter for whose sake she had doubtless come—a frowning beauty who, in spite of her dowdy dress and ugly boots, somehow declared herself as having already broken away from the maternal tradition.
Mme. de Tranlay's presence in that drawing-room was characteristic enough. It meant—how often one heard it nowadays!—that mothers had to take their daughters wherever there was a chance of their meeting young men, and that such chances were found only in the few "foreign" houses where, discreetly, almost clandestinely, entertaining had been resumed. You had to take them there, Mme. de Tranlay's look seemed to say, because they had to be married (the sooner the better in these wild times, with all the old barriers down), and because the young men were growing so tragically few, and the competition was so fierce, and because in such emergencies a French mother, whose first thought is always for her children, must learn to accept, even to seek, propinquities from which her inmost soul, and all the ancestral souls within her, would normally recoil.
​Campton remembered her gallant attitude on the day when, under her fresh crape, she had rebuked Mrs. Brant's despondency. "But how she hates it here—how she must loathe sitting next to that woman!" he thought; and just then he saw her turn toward Mme. de Dolmetsch with a stiff bend from the waist, and heard her say in her most conciliatory tone: "Your great friend, the rich American, chère Madame, the benefactor of France—we should so like to thank him, Claire and I, for all he is doing for our country."
Beckoned to by Mme. de Dolmetsch, Mr. Mayhew, all pink and silver and prominent pearl scarf-pin, bowed before the Tranlay ladies, while the Marquise deeply murmured: "We are grateful—we shall not forget———" and Mademoiselle de Tranlay, holding him with her rich gaze, added in fluent English: "Mamma hopes you'll come to tea on Sunday—with no one but my uncle the Duc de Montlhéry—so that we may thank you better than we can here."
"Great women—great women!" Campton mused. He was still watching Mme. de Tranlay's dauntless mask when her glance deserted the gratified Mayhew to seize on a younger figure. It was that of George, who had just entered. Mme. de Tranlay, with a quick turn, caught Campton's eye, greeted him with her trenchant cordiality, and asked, in a voice like the pounce of talons: "The young officer who has the Legion ​of Honour—the one you just nodded to—with reddish hair and his left arm in a sling? French, I suppose, from his uniform; and yet———? Yes, talking to Mrs. Talkett. Can you tell me———?"
"My son," said Campton with satisfaction.
The effect was instantaneous, though Mme. de Tranlay kept her radiant steadiness. "How charming—charming—charming!" And, after a proper interval: "But, Claire, my child, we've not yet spoken to Mrs. Brant, whom I see over there." And she steered her daughter swiftly toward Julia.
Campton's eyes returned to his son. George was still with Mrs. Talkett, but they had only had time for a word or two before she was called away to seat an important dowager. In that moment, however, the father noted many things. George, as usual nowadays, kept his air of guarded kindliness, though the blue of his eyes grew deeper; but Mrs. Talkett seemed bathed in light. It was such a self-revelation that Campton's curiosity was lost in the artist's abstract joy. "If I could have painted her like that!" he thought, reminded of having caught Mme. de Dolmetsch transfigured by fear for her lover; but an instant later he remembered. "Poor little thing!" he murmured. Mrs. Talkett turned her head, as if his thought had reached her. "Oh, yes—oh, yes; come and let me tell you all about it," her eyes entreated him. But Mayhew and Sir Cyril Jorgenstein were between them.
​"George!" Mrs. Brant called; and across the intervening groups Campton saw his son bowing to the Marquise de Tranlay.
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 to-day, 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 Mlle. 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 Mlle. 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 Montlhéry'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 accounts 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.