“Well?” she questioned.
He was silent in his turn, and she did not insist. They sat facing each other, each forgetting the purpose of their meeting. For the hundredth time he felt the uselessness of trying to carry out George’s filial injunction: between himself and George’s mother these months of fiery trial seemed to have loosed instead of tightening the links.
He wandered back to Montmartre through the bereft and beautiful city. The light lay on it in wide silvery washes, harmonizing the grey stone, the pale foliage, and a sky piled with clouds which seemed to rebuild in translucid masses the monuments below. He caught himself once more viewing the details of the scene in the terms of his trade. River, pavements, terraces heavy with trees, the whole crowded sky-line from Notre Dame to the Panthéon, instead of presenting themselves in their bare reality, were transposed into a painter’s vision. And the faces around him became again the starting-point of rapid incessant combinations of line and colour, as if the visible world were once more at its old trick of weaving itself into magic designs. The reawakening of this instinct deepened Campton’s sense of unrest, and made him feel more than ever unfitted for a life in which such things were no longer of account, in which it seemed a disloyalty even to think of them.
He returned to the studio, having promised to deal with some office work which he had carried home the night before. The papers lay on the table; but he turned to the window and looked out over his budding lilacs at the new strange Paris. He remembered that it was almost a year since he had leaned in the same place, gazing down on the wise and frivolous old city in her summer dishabille while he planned his journey to Africa with George; and something George had once quoted from Faust came drifting through his mind: “Take care! You’ve broken my beautiful world! There’ll be splinters....” Ah, yes, splinters, splinters ... everybody’s hands were red with them! What retribution devised by man could be commensurate with the crime of destroying his beautiful world? Campton sat down to the task of collating office files.
His bell rang, and he started up, as much surprised as if the simplest events had become unusual. It would be natural enough that Dastrey or Boylston should drop in—or even Adele Anthony—but his heart beat as if it might be George. He limped to the door, and found Mrs. Talkett.
She said: “May I come in?” and did so without waiting for his answer. The rapidity of her entrance surprised him less than the change in her appearance. But for the one glimpse of her dishevelled elegance, when she had rushed into Mrs. Brant’s drawing-room on the day after war was declared, he had seen her only in a nursing uniform, as absorbed in her work as if it had been a long-thwarted vocation. Now she stood before him in raiment so delicately springlike that it seemed an emanation of the day. Care had dropped from her with her professional garb, and she smiled as though he must guess the reason.
In ordinary times he would have thought: “She’s in love——” but that explanation was one which seemed to belong to other days. It reminded him, however, how little he knew of Mrs. Talkett, who, after René Davril’s death, had vanished from his life as abruptly as she had entered it. Allusions to “the Talketts,” picked up now and again at Adele Anthony’s, led him to conjecture an invisible husband in the background; but all he knew of Mrs. Talkett was what she had told him of her “artistic” yearnings, and what he had been able to divine from her empty questioning eyes, from certain sweet inflections when she spoke of her wounded soldiers, and from the precise and finished language with which she clothed her unfinished and imprecise thoughts. All these indications made up an image not unlike that of the fashion-plate torn from its context of which she had reminded him at their first meeting; and he looked at her with indifference, wondering why she had come.
With an abrupt gesture she pulled the pin from her heavily-plumed hat, tossed it on the divan, and said: “Dear Master, I just want to sit with you and have you talk to me.” She dropped down beside her hat, clasped her thin hands about her thin knee, and broke out, as if she had already forgotten that she wanted him to talk to her: “Do you know, I’ve made up my mind to begin to live again—to live my own life, I mean, to be my real me, after all these dreadful months of exile from myself. I see now that that is my real duty—just as it is yours, just as it is that of every artist and every creator. Don’t you feel as I do? Don’t you agree with me? We must save Beauty for the world; before it is too late we must save it out of this awful wreck and ruin. It sounds ridiculously presumptuous, doesn’t it, to say ‘we’ in talking of a great genius like you and a poor little speck of dust like me? But after all there is the same instinct in us, the same craving, the same desire to realize Beauty, though you do it so magnificently and so—so objectively, and I ...” she paused, unclasped her hands, and lifted her lovely bewildered eyes, “I do it only by a ribbon in my hair, a flower in a vase, a way of looping a curtain, or placing a lacquer screen in the right light. But I oughtn’t to be ashamed of my limitations, do you think I ought? Surely every one ought to be helping to save Beauty; every one is needed, even the humblest and most ignorant of us, or else the world will be all death and ugliness. And after all, ugliness is the only real death, isn’t it?” She drew a deep breath and added: “It has done me good already to sit here and listen to you.”
Campton, a few weeks previously, would have been amused, or perhaps merely irritated. But in the interval he had become aware in himself of the same irresistible craving to “live,” as she put it, and as he had heard it formulated, that very day, by the mourning mother who had so sharply rebuked Mrs. Brant. The spring was stirring them all in their different ways, secreting in them the sap which craved to burst into bridge-parties, or the painting of masterpieces, or a consciousness of the need for new shirts.
“But what am I in all this?” Mrs. Talkett rushed on, sparing him the trouble of a reply. “Nothing but the match that lights the flame! Sometimes I imagine that I might put what I mean into poetry ... I have scribbled a few things, you know ... but that’s not what I was going to tell you. It’s you, dear Master, who must set us the example of getting back to our work, our real work, whatever it is. What have you done in all these dreadful months—the real You? Nothing! And the world will be the poorer for it ever after. Master, you must paint again—you must begin to-day!”