He always stopped for a word now; fearing each time that there was bad news of Jules Lebel, but not wishing to seem to avoid her.
To-day, however, Mme. Lebel, though mysterious, was not anxious.
“Monsieur will find the studio open. There’s a lady: she insisted on going up.”
“A lady? Why did you let her in? What kind of a lady?”
177“A lady—well, a lady with such magnificent furs that one couldn’t keep her out in the cold,” Mme. Lebel answered with simplicity1.
Campton went up apprehensively2. The idea of unknown persons in possession of his studio always made him nervous. Whoever they were, whatever errands they came on, they always—especially women—disturbed the tranquil3 course of things, faced him with unexpected problems, unsettled him in one way or another. Bouncing in on people suddenly was like dynamiting5 fish: it left him with his mind full of fragments of dismembered thoughts.
As he entered he perceived from the temperate6 atmosphere that Mme. Lebel had not only opened the studio but made up the fire. The lady’s furs must indeed be magnificent.
She sat at the farther end of the room, in a high-backed chair near the stove, and when she rose he recognized his former wife. The long sable7 cloak, which had slipped back over the chair, justified8 Mme. Lebel’s description, but the dress beneath it appeared to Campton simpler than Mrs. Brant’s habitual9 raiment. The lamplight, striking up into her powdered face, puffed10 out her under-lids and made harsh hollows in her cheeks. She looked frightened, ill and yet determined11.
“John——” she began, laying her hand on his sleeve.
It was the first time she had ever set foot in his shabby quarters, and in his astonishment12 he could only stammer13 out: “Julia——”
178But as he looked at her he saw that her face was wet with tears. “Not—bad news?” he broke out.
She shook her head and, drawing a handkerchief from a diamond-monogrammed bag, wiped away the tears and the powder. Then she pressed the handkerchief to her lips, gazing at him with eyes as helpless as a child’s.
“Sit down,” said Campton.
As they faced each other across the long table, with papers and paint-rags and writing materials pushed aside to make room for the threadbare napkin on which his plate and glass, and bottle of vin ordinaire, were set out, he wondered if the scene woke in her any memory of their first days of gaiety and poverty, or if she merely pitied him for still living in such squalor. And suddenly it occurred to him that when the war was over, and George came back, it would be pleasant to hunt out a little apartment in an old house in the Faubourg St. Germain, put some good furniture in it, and oppose the discreeter charm of such an interior to the heavy splendours of the Avenue Marigny. How could he expect to hold a luxury-loving youth if he had only this dingy14 studio to receive him in?
Mrs. Brant began to speak.
“I came here to see you because I didn’t wish any one to know; not Adele, nor even Anderson.” Leaning toward him she went on in short breathless sentences: “I’ve just left Madge Talkett: you know her, I think? 179She’s at Mme. de Dolmetsch’s hospital. Something dreadful has happened ... too dreadful. It seems that Mme. de Dolmetsch was very much in love with Ladislas Isador; a writer, wasn’t he? I don’t know his books, but Madge tells me they’re wonderful ... and of course men like that ought not to be sent to the front....”
“Men like what?”
“Geniuses,” said Mrs. Brant. “He was dreadfully delicate besides, and was doing admirable work on some military commission in Paris; I believe he knew any number of languages. And poor Mme. de Dolmetsch—you know I’ve never approved of her; but things are so changed nowadays, and at any rate she was madly attached to him, and had done everything to keep him in Paris: medical certificates, people at Headquarters working for her, and all the rest. But it seems there are no end of officers always intriguing15 to get staff-jobs: strong able-bodied young men who ought to be in the trenches16, and are fit for nothing else, but who are jealous of the others. And last week, in spite of all she could do, poor Isador was ordered to the front.”
Campton made an impatient movement. It was even more distasteful to him to be appealed to by Mrs. Brant in Isador’s name than by Mme. de Dolmetsch in George’s. His gorge17 rose at the thought that people should associate in their minds cases as different as those of his son and Mme. de Dolmetsch’s lover.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But if you’ve come to ask 180me to do something more about George—take any new steps—it’s no use. I can’t do the sort of thing to keep my son safe that Mme. de Dolmetsch would do for her lover.”
Mrs. Brant stared. “Safe? He was killed the day after he got to the front.”
“Good Lord—Isador?”
Ladislas Isador killed at the front! The words remained unmeaning; by no effort could Campton relate them to the fat middle-aged18 philanderer19 with his Jewish eyes, his Slav eloquence20, his Levantine gift for getting on, and for getting out from under. Campton tried to picture the clever contriving21 devil drawn22 in his turn into that merciless red eddy23, and gulped24 down the Monster’s throat with the rest. What a mad world it was, in which the same horrible and magnificent doom25 awaited the coward and the hero!
“Poor Mme. de Dolmetsch!” he muttered, remembering with a sense of remorse26 her desperate appeal and his curt27 rebuff. Once again the poor creature’s love had enlightened her, and she had foreseen what no one else in the world would have believed: that her lover was to die like a hero.
“Isador was nearly forty, and had a weak heart; and she’d left nothing, literally28 nothing, undone29 to save him.” Campton read in his wife’s eyes what was coming. “It’s impossible now that George should not be taken,” Mrs. Brant went on.
181The same thought had tightened30 Campton’s own heart-strings; but he had hoped she would not say it.
“It may be George’s turn any day,” she insisted.
They sat and looked at each other without speaking; then she began again imploringly31: “I tell you there’s not a moment to be lost!”
Campton picked up a palette-knife and began absently to rub it with an oily rag. Mrs. Brant’s anguished32 voice still sounded on. “Unless something is done immediately.... It appears there’s a regular hunt for embusqués, as they’re called. As if it was everybody’s business to be killed! How’s the staff-work to be carried on if they’re all taken? But it’s certain that if we don’t act at once ... act energetically....”
Her lids opened wide. “But he’s our child.”
“Your husband knows more people—he has ways, you’ve often told me——”
She reddened faintly and seemed about to speak; but the reply died on her lips.
“Why did you say,” Campton pursued, “that you had come here because you wanted to see me without Brant’s knowing it?”
She lowered her eyes and fixed them on the knife he was still automatically rubbing.
“Because Anderson thinks.... Anderson won’t.... He says he’s done all he can.”
182“Ah——” cried Campton, drawing a deep breath. He threw back his shoulders, as if to shake off a weight. “I—feel exactly as Brant does,” he declared.
“You—you feel as he does? You, George’s father? But a father has never done all he can for his son! There’s always something more that he can do!”
The words, breaking from her in a cry, seemed suddenly to change her from an ageing doll into a living and agonized34 woman. Campton had never before felt as near to her, as moved to the depths by her. For the length of a heart-beat he saw her again with a red-haired baby in her arms, the light of morning on her face.
“My dear—I’m sorry.” He laid his hand on hers.
“Sorry—sorry? I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to do something—I want you to save him!”
He faced her with bent35 head, gazing absently at their interwoven fingers: each hand had forgotten to release the other.
“I can’t do anything more,” he repeated.
She started up with a despairing exclamation36. “What’s happened to you? Who has influenced you? What has changed you?”
How could he answer her? He hardly knew himself: had hardly been conscious of the change till she suddenly flung it in his face. If blind animal passion be the profoundest as well as the fiercest form of attachment37, his love for his boy was at that moment as nothing 183to hers. Yet his feeling for George, in spite of all the phrases he dressed it in, had formerly38 in its essence been no other. That his boy should survive—survive at any price—that had been all he cared for or sought to achieve. It had been convenient to justify39 himself by arguing that George was not bound to fight for France; but Campton now knew that he would have made the same effort to protect his son if the country engaged had been his own.
In the careless pre-war world, as George himself had once said, it had seemed unbelievable that people should ever again go off and die in a ditch to oblige anybody. Even now, the automatic obedience40 of the millions of the untaught and the unthinking, though it had its deep pathetic significance, did not move Campton like the clear-eyed sacrifice of the few who knew why they were dying. Jean Fortin, René Davril, and such lads as young Louis Dastrey, with his reasoned horror of butchery and waste in general, and his instant grasp of the necessity of this particular sacrifice: it was they who had first shed light on the dark problem.
Campton had never before, at least consciously, thought of himself and the few beings he cared for as part of a greater whole, component41 elements of the immense amazing spectacle. But the last four months had shown him man as a defenceless animal suddenly torn from his shell, stripped of all the interwoven tendrils 184of association, habit, background, daily ways and words, daily sights and sounds, and flung out of the human habitable world into naked ether, where nothing breathes or lives. That was what war did; that was why those who best understood it in all its farthest-reaching abomination willingly gave their lives to put an end to it.
He heard Mrs. Brant crying.
“Julia,” he said, “Julia, I wish you’d try to see....”
She dashed away her tears. “See what? All I see is you, sitting here safe and saying you can do nothing to save him! But to have the right to say that you ought to be in the trenches yourself! What do you suppose those young men out there think of their fathers, safe at home, who are too high-minded and conscientious42 to protect them?”
He looked at her compassionately43. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the bitterest part of it. But for that, there would hardly be anything in the worst war for us old people to lie awake about.”
Mrs. Brant had stood up and was feverishly44 pulling on her gloves: he saw that she no longer heard him. He helped her to draw her furs about her, and stood waiting while she straightened her veil and tapped the waves of hair into place, her eyes blindly seeking for a mirror. There was nothing more that either could say.
He lifted the lamp, and went out of the door ahead of her.
“You needn’t come down,” she said in a sob45; but leaning over the rail into the darkness he answered: “I’ll give you a light: the concierge46 has forgotten the lamp on the stairs.”
He went ahead of her down the long greasy47 flights, and as they reached the ground floor he heard a noise of feet coming and going, and frightened voices exclaiming. In the doorway48 of the porter’s lodge49 Mrs. Brant’s splendid chauffeur50 stood looking on compassionately at a group of women gathered about Mme. Lebel.
The old woman sat in her den4, her arms stretched across the table, her sewing fallen at her feet. On the table lay an open letter. The grocer’s wife from the corner stood by, sobbing51.
Mrs. Brant stopped, and Campton, sure now of what was coming, pushed his way through the neighbours about the door. Mme. Lebel’s eyes met his with the mute reproach of a tortured animal. “Jules,” she said, “last Wednesday ... through the heart.”
Campton took her old withered52 hand. The women ceased sobbing and a hush53 fell upon the stifling54 little room. When Campton looked up again he saw Julia Brant, pale and bewildered, hurrying toward her motor, and the vault55 of the porte-cochère sent back the chauffeur’s answer to her startled question: “Poor old lady—yes, her only son’s been killed at the front.”
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收听单词发音
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1
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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apprehensively
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| adv.担心地 | |
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tranquil
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| adj. 安静的, 宁静的, 稳定的, 不变的 | |
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den
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| n.兽穴；秘密地方；安静的小房间，私室 | |
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5
dynamiting
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| v.（尤指用于采矿的）甘油炸药( dynamite的现在分词 )；会引起轰动的人[事物]；增重 | |
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6
temperate
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| adj.温和的，温带的，自我克制的，不过分的 | |
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7
sable
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| n.黑貂；adj.黑色的 | |
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8
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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9
habitual
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| adj.习惯性的；通常的，惯常的 | |
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10
puffed
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| adj.疏松的v.使喷出( puff的过去式和过去分词 )；喷着汽（或烟）移动；吹嘘；吹捧 | |
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11
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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12
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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stammer
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| n.结巴，口吃；v.结结巴巴地说 | |
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14
dingy
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| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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15
intriguing
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| adj.有趣的；迷人的v.搞阴谋诡计(intrigue的现在分词)；激起…的好奇心 | |
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16
trenches
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| 深沟，地沟( trench的名词复数 )； 战壕 | |
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17
gorge
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| n.咽喉，胃，暴食，山峡；v.塞饱，狼吞虎咽地吃 | |
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18
middle-aged
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| adj.中年的 | |
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philanderer
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| n.爱和女人调情的男人，玩弄女性的男人 | |
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20
eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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21
contriving
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| （不顾困难地）促成某事( contrive的现在分词 )； 巧妙地策划，精巧地制造（如机器）； 设法做到 | |
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22
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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23
eddy
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| n.漩涡，涡流 | |
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24
gulped
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| v.狼吞虎咽地吃，吞咽( gulp的过去式和过去分词 )；大口地吸（气）；哽住 | |
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25
doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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26
remorse
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| n.痛恨，悔恨，自责 | |
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27
curt
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| adj.简短的，草率的 | |
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28
literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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29
undone
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| a.未做完的，未完成的 | |
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30
tightened
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| 收紧( tighten的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）变紧； （使）绷紧； 加紧 | |
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31
imploringly
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| adv. 恳求地, 哀求地 | |
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32
anguished
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| adj.极其痛苦的v.使极度痛苦(anguish的过去式) | |
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33
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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34
agonized
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| v.使（极度）痛苦，折磨( agonize的过去式和过去分词 )；苦斗；苦苦思索；感到极度痛苦 | |
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35
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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36
exclamation
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| n.感叹号，惊呼，惊叹词 | |
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37
attachment
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| n.附属物，附件；依恋；依附 | |
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38
formerly
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| adv.从前，以前 | |
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39
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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40
obedience
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| n.服从，顺从 | |
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41
component
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| n.组成部分，成分，元件；adj.组成的，合成的 | |
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42
conscientious
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| adj.审慎正直的，认真的，本着良心的 | |
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43
compassionately
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| adv.表示怜悯地，有同情心地 | |
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44
feverishly
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| adv. 兴奋地 | |
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45
sob
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| n.空间轨道的轰炸机；呜咽，哭泣 | |
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46
concierge
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| n.管理员；门房 | |
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47
greasy
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| adj. 多脂的，油脂的 | |
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48
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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49
lodge
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| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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50
chauffeur
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| n.(受雇于私人或公司的)司机；v.为…开车 | |
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51
sobbing
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| <主方>Ⅰ adj.湿透的 | |
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52
withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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53
hush
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| int.嘘，别出声；n.沉默，静寂；v.使安静 | |
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54
stifling
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| a.令人窒息的 | |
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55
vault
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| n.拱形圆顶，地窖，地下室 | |
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