XX
For a month Campton painted on in transcendent bliss.
His first stroke carried him out of space and time, into a region where all that had become numbed and atrophied in him could expand and breathe. Lines, images, colours were again the sole facts: he plunged into their whirling circles like a stranded sea-creature into the sea. Once more every face was not a vague hieroglyph, a curtain drawn before an invisible aggregate of wants and woes, but a work of art, a flower in a pattern, to be dealt with on its own merits, like a bronze or a jewel. During the first day or two his hand halted; but the sense of insufficiency was a goad, and he fought with his subject till he felt a strange ease in every renovated muscle, and his model became like a musical instrument on which he played with careless mastery.
He had transferred his easel to Mrs. Talkett’s apartment. It was an odd patchwork place, full of bold beginnings and doubtful pauses, rash surrenders to the newest fashions and abrupt insurrections against them, where Louis Philippe mahogany had entrenched itself against the aggression of art nouveau hangings, and the frail grace of eighteenth-century armchairs shed derision on lumpy modern furniture painted like hobby-horses at a fair. It amused Campton to do Mrs. Talkett against such a background: her thin personality needed to be filled out by the visible results of its many quests and cravings. There were people one could sit down before a blank wall, and all their world was there, in the curves of their faces and the way their hands lay in their laps; others, like Mrs. Talkett, seemed to be made out of the reflection of what surrounded them, as if they had been born of a tricky grouping of looking-glasses, and would vanish if it were changed.
At first Campton was steeped in the mere sensual joy of his art; but after a few days the play of the mirrors began to interest him. Mrs. Talkett had abandoned her hospital work, and was trying, as she said, to “recreate herself.” In this she was aided by a number of people who struck Campton as rather too young not to have found some other job, or too old to care any longer for that particular one. But all this did not trouble his newly recovered serenity. He seemed to himself, somehow, like a drowned body—but drowned in a toy aquarium—still staring about with living eyes, but aware of the other people only as shapes swimming by with a flash of exotic fins. They were enclosed together, all of them, in an unreal luminous sphere, mercifully screened against the reality from which a common impulse of horror had driven them; and since he was among them it was not his business to wonder at the others. So, through the cloud of his art, he looked out on them impartially.
The high priestess of the group was Mme. de Dolmetsch, with Harvey Mayhew as her acolyte. Mr. Mayhew was still in pursuit of Atrocities: he was in fact almost the only member of the group who did not rather ostentatiously disavow the obligation to “carry on.” But he had discovered that to discharge this sacred task he must vary it by frequent intervals of relaxation. He explained to Campton that he had found it to be “his duty to rest”; and he was indefatigable in the performance of duty. He had therefore, with an expenditure of eloquence which Campton thought surprisingly slight, persuaded Boylston to become his understudy, and devote several hours a day to the whirling activities of the shrimp-pink Bureau of Atrocities at the Nouveau Luxe. Campton, at first, could not understand how the astute Boylston had allowed himself to be drawn into the eddy; but it turned out that Boylston’s astuteness had drawn him in. “You see, there’s an awful lot of money to be got out of it, one way and another, and I know a use for every penny—that is, Miss Anthony and I do,” the young man modestly explained; adding, in response to the painter’s puzzled stare, that Mr. Mayhew’s harrowing appeals were beginning to bring from America immense sums for the Victims, and that Mr. Mayhew, while immensely gratified by the effect of his eloquence, and the prestige it was bringing him in French social and governmental circles, had not the cloudiest notion how the funds should be used, and had begged Boylston to advise him. It was owing to this that the ex-Delegate to the Hague was able, with a light conscience, to seek the repose of Mrs. Talkett’s company and, with a smile of the widest initiation, to listen to the subversive conversation of her familiars.
“Subversive” was the motto of the group. Every one was engaged in attacking some theory of art or life or letters which nobody in particular defended. Even Mr. Talkett—a kindly young man with eye-glasses and glossy hair, who roamed about straightening the furniture, like a gentlemanly detective watching the presents at a wedding—owned to Campton that he was subversive; and on the painter’s pressing for a definition, added: “Why, I don’t believe in anything she doesn’t believe in,” while his eye-glasses shyly followed his wife’s course among the teacups.
Mme. de Dolmetsch, though obviously anxious to retain her hold on Mr. Mayhew, did not restrict herself to such mild fare, but exercised her matchless eyes on a troop of followers: the shock-haired pianist who accompanied her recitations, a straight-backed young American diplomatist whose collars seemed a part of his career, a lustrous South American millionaire, and a short squat Sicilian who designed the costumes for the pianist’s unproduced ballets.
All these people appeared to believe intensely in each other’s reality and importance; but it gradually came over Campton that all of them, excepting their host and hostess, knew that they were merely masquerading.
To Campton, used to the hard-working world of art, this playing at Bohemia seemed a nursery-game; but the scene acquired an unexpected solidity from the appearance in it, one day, of the banker Jorgenstein, who strolled in as naturally as if he had been dropping into Campton’s studio to enquire into the progress of his own portrait.