_By_ MARY HEATON VORSE
From _Harper’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._
_Copyright, 1919, by Mary Heaton O’Brien._
What Hazelton’s friends called his second manner had for a mother
despair, and for a father irony, and for a godmother necessity. It
leaped into his mind full-grown, charged with the vitality of his
bitterness.
Success had always been scratching at Hazelton’s door, and then hurrying
past. The world had always been saying to him, “Very well, very well
indeed; just a little bit better and you shall have the recognition that
should be yours.” Patrons came and almost bought pictures. He was
accepted only to be hung so badly that his singing color was lost on the
sky-line. Critics would infuriate him by telling him that he had
almost—_almost_, mind you—painted the impossible; that his painting was
what they called “a little too blond.”
How Hazelton hated that insincere phrase which meant nothing, for, as he
explained to Dumont the critic, as they sat outside the Café de la
Rotonde after their return from the _Salon_, Nature was blond—what else?
He, Dumont, came from the Midi, didn’t he? Well, then, he knew what
sunshine was! How could paint equal the color of a summer’s day, the sun
shining on the flesh of a blond woman, a white dress against a white
wall? Blond? Because he loved the vitality of light they wanted him to
dip his brush in an ink-pot—_hein_? Dumont would be pleased if he harked
back to the gloom of the old Dutch school, or if he imitated the massed
insincerities of Boecklen, Hazelton opined from the depths of his scorn.
Dumont poised himself for flight on the edge of his hard metal chair. He
was bored, but he had to admit that if ever Hazelton was justified in
bitterness it was to-day when, after a long search through the miles of
canvases, he had finally discovered his two pictures hung in such a
position as to be as effective as two white spots. He escaped, leaving
Hazelton hunched over the table, his forceful, pugnacious, red
countenance contrasting oddly with the subtle anemia of his absinthe. He
was followed by Hazelton’s choleric shouts, which informed him that he,
Hazelton, could paint with mud for a medium if he chose.
His profession of art critic had accustomed Dumont to the difficulties
of the artistic temperament, and he thought no more of Hazelton until he
ran into him some ten days later. There was malice in Hazelton’s small,
brilliant eyes, and an air of suppressed triumph in his muscular
deep-chested figure. His face was red, partly from living out of doors
and partly from drink. He rolled as he walked, not quite like a bear and
not quite like a seafaring man—a vigorous, pugnacious person whose
vehement greeting made Dumont apprehensive until he glanced at
Hazelton’s hands, which were reassuringly small.
“Well,” he said, “you remember our conversation? It was the parent, my
dear Dumont, of dead-sea fruit of the most mature variety.” Hazelton
considered this a joke, and laughed at it with satisfaction. He was very
much pleased with himself.
Dumont went with Hazelton to his studio. On Hazelton’s easel was a
picture of dark, wind-swept trees beaten by a storm. They silhouetted
themselves against a sinister and menacing sky. The thing was full of
violence and fury, it was drenched with wet and blown with wind.
“Who did this?” asked Dumont. “It is magnificent!”
“You _like_ it?” asked Hazelton, incredulously. And then he repeated
himself, changing his accent, “_You_ like it, Dumont?”
“Certainly I like it,” Dumont answered, a trifle stiffly. “There is
vitality, form, color! Because you are not happy unless you are in the
midst of a sunbath, at least permit others to vary their moods.”
At this Hazelton burst into loud laughter.
“You amuse yourself,” Dumont observed, but Hazelton continued to laugh
uproariously, shaking his wide shoulders.
“Do you know the name of that picture? The name of that picture is ‘_La
Guigne Noire_’—I painted it from the depths of my bad luck.”
“_Hein?_” said Dumont. “_You_ painted that picture?”
“This picture—if you call it that—I painted.”
“I call it a picture,” Dumont asserted, dryly.
“I call it a practical joke,” said Hazelton. “One does not paint
pictures with the tongue in one’s cheek. I know how one paints
pictures.”
“How one paints pictures makes no difference,” Dumont replied,
impatiently. “Who cares if you had your tongue in your cheek? You had
your brush in your hand. The result is that which matters. This work has
completeness.”
Hazelton slapped his thigh with a mighty blow. “Mon Dieu!” he cried. “If
this fools you, there are others it will fool as well—and I need the
money! And from that bubbling artesian well from which this sprang I can
see a million others like it—like it, but not like it. _Hein, mon
vieux?_ Come, come, my child, to Mercier’s, who will sell it for me. The
day of glory has arrived!”
A sardonic malice sparkled on Hazelton’s ugly face, and his nose, which
jutted out with a sudden truculency, was redder than ever. He took the
picture up and danced solemnly around the studio.
It was in this indecorous fashion, to the echo of Hazelton’s bitter
laughter, that his second manner was born, and that he achieved his
first success, for his second manner was approved by the public.
Three years went past. Hazelton was medaled. He was well hung now, he
sold moderately, but he never sold the work which he respected. At last
his constant failure with what he called “his own pictures” had made him
so sensitive that he no longer exposed them.
Hazelton’s position was that of the parent in the old-fashioned fairy
tale who had two children, one beautiful and dark-haired, whom he
despised and ill-treated and made work that the child of light might
thrive. That, in his good-tempered moments, was how he explained the
matter to his friends.
Dumont explained to Hazelton that he had two personalities and that he
had no cause to be ashamed of this second and subjective one, even
though he had discovered it by chance and in a moment of mockery.
“You have an artistic integrity that is proof even against yourself,”
was his analysis.
The insistence of the public and of Dumont, in whose critical judgment
he had believed, gave him something like respect for his foster-child.
His belief in his judgment was subtly undermined.
“I shall leave you,” he told Dumont. “I shall secrete myself in the
country undefiled by the artist’s paintbrush and there I will paint a
_chef d’œuvre_ entitled ‘Le Mal du Ventre.’ On its proceeds I will
return to my blond.”
While engaged on this work, which later became Hazelton’s most
successful picture, Hazelton met Raoul de Vilmarte. This young man was a
poor painter, but a delightful companion, and he endeared himself to
Hazelton at once by his naïve enthusiasm for Hazelton’s former pictures.
“What grace they had—what beauty—what light! What an extraordinary irony
that you should throw away a gift that I should so have cherished!” he
exclaimed.
His words were to Hazelton like rain to a dying plant. He stopped work
on “Le Mal du Ventre,” and began to paint to “suit himself” again. He
had a childish delight in surprising De Vilmarte with his new picture.
“Why, why,” cried his new friend, “do you permit yourself to bury this
supreme talent? No one has painted sunlight as well! Compared with this,
darkness enshrouds the canvases of all other masters! Why do you not
claim your position as the apostle of light?”
Hazelton explained that critics and the public had forced these canvases
into obscurity.
“Another name signed to them—a Frenchman preferably—and we might hear a
different story,” he added.
A sudden idea came to De Vilmarte. “Listen!” he said. “I have exposed
nothing for two years. Indeed, I have been doubtful as to whether I
should expose again. I know well enough that were my family unknown and
were not certain members of the jury my masters, and others friends of
my family, I might never have been accepted at all—it has been a
sensitive point with me. Unfortunately, my mother and my friends believe
me to be a genius—”
“Well?” said Hazelton, seeing some plan moving darkly through De
Vilmarte’s talk.
“Well,” said De Vilmarte, slowly, “we might play a joke upon the critics
of France. There is a gap between this and my work—immeasurable—one I
could never bridge—and yet it is plausible—” He glanced from a sketch of
his he was carrying to Hazelton’s picture.
Hazelton looked from one to the other. Compared, a gulf was there,
fixed, unbridgable, and yet— He twisted his small, nervous hands
together. Malice sparkled from his eyes.
“It _is_ plausible!” he agreed. He held out his hand. A sparkle of his
malice gleamed in De Vilmarte’s pale eyes. They said no more. They shook
hands. Later it seemed to Hazelton the ultimate irony that they should
have entered into their sinister alliance with levity.
The second phase of the joke seemed as little menacing. You can imagine
the three of them outside the Rotonde, Hazelton and De Vilmarte
listening to Dumont’s praise of De Vilmarte’s picture. You can enter
into the feelings of cynicism, of disillusion, that filled the hearts of
the two _farceurs_. De Vilmarte’s picture had been accepted, hung well,
then medaled. The critics had acclaimed him!
They sat there delicately baiting Dumont, bound together by the
knowledge that they had against the world—for they, and they alone, knew
the stuff of which fame is made. They were in the position of the
pessimist who has proof of his pessimism. No one really believes the
world as bad as he pretends, and here De Vilmarte and Hazelton had proof
of their most ignoble suspicions; here was the corroding knowledge that
Raoul’s position and popularity could achieve the recognition denied to
an unknown man. He was French, and on the inside, and Hazelton was a
foreigner and on the outside.
“Well,” said Raoul, when Dumont had left them, “we have a fine _gaffe_
to spring on them, _hein_? It’s going to cost me something. My mother is
charmed—she will take it rather badly, I am afraid.”
“Well, why should she take it?” asked Hazelton, after a pause. “Why
should we share our joke with all the world?”
“You mean?” asked Raoul.
It was then that the voice of fate spoke through Hazelton.
“You can have the picture,” he said, jerking his big head impatiently.
“Do you mean that I can have it—to keep?”
“Have it if you like. Money and what money buys is all I want from now
on,” said Hazelton, and he shook his shoulders grossly and sensually
while his nervous hands, the hands whose work the picture was, twisted
themselves as though in agonized protest.
Hazelton went back to his studio and stood before his blond pictures,
the children of his heart. It was already evening, but they shone out in
the dim light. He was a little tipsy.
“So,” he said to them—“so all these years you have deceived me, as many
a man has been deceived before by his beloved. Your flaunting smiles
made me think you were what you are not. Dumont was right—my
foster-child is better than you, for she made her way alone and without
favor. I tried to think I had painted the impossible. Light is beyond
me. Why should I think I could paint light? I am a child of darkness and
misfortune. I know who my beloved is. You shall no longer work to
support your sister!”
“What are you doing?” came his wife’s querulous voice. “Talking and
mumbling to yourself before your pictures in the dark? Are you drunk
again?”
――――
Some months passed before De Vilmarte and Hazelton met again. They ran
into each other on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard
du Montparnasse.
“Hey! What are you doing so far from home?” cried Hazelton.
“Looking for you.”
“I was going to you,” Hazelton acknowledged.
They stared at each other scrutinizingly, each measuring the other with
dawning distrust. Each waited.
“Let us go to the Rotonde,” Hazelton suggested.
They talked of other things, each waiting for the other to begin.
Hazelton had the most resistance; he had flipped a penny as to whether
he should go to seek De Vilmarte, but De Vilmarte had made his decision
with anguish. It was he who finally said:
“You know—about the matter of the picture—my mother is quite frantic
about my success. She is failing—”
“_Toc!_” cried Hazelton. “My poor wife has to go to the hospital.”
“Nothing to do, I know,” said De Vilmarte, looking away diffidently,
“but for one’s mother—”
“But for one’s wife,” Hazelton capped him, genially. “An aged mother and
a sick wife, and a joke on the world shared between two friends— What
will a man not do for his sick wife and for his aged mother!”
A little shiver of cold disgust ran over Raoul. For the first time he
felt a vague antipathy for Hazelton, his neck was so short and he rolled
his big head in such a preposterous fashion.
They said good-by, Hazelton’s swagger, De Vilmarte’s averted eyes
betraying their guilty knowledge that they had bought and sold things
that should not be for sale.
Just how it came to be a settled affair neither De Vilmarte nor Hazelton
could have told. Now an exhibition occurred for which De Vilmarte needed
a picture; now Hazelton dogged by his need of money would come to him.
Hazelton’s wife was always ailing. Her beauty and her disposition had
been undermined by ill-health and self-indulgence, and he was one of
those men temperamentally in debt and always on the edge of being sued
or dispossessed.
But in Hazelton’s brain a fantastic and mad sense of rivalry grew. He
had transferred his affection to his darker mood. Every notice of De
Vilmarte’s name rankled in his mind. De Vilmarte’s growing vogue
infuriated him. He felt that he must wring from the critics and the
public the recognition that was his due so that this child of his, born
of his irony and his despair, and that had been so faithful to him in
spite of abuse, might be crowned. Just what had happened to both of them
they realized after the opening of the _Salon_ next year.
“Take care,” Hazelton had warned De Vilmarte, “that they do not hang you
better than they do me. That I will not have.” He had said it jokingly;
but while De Vilmarte’s exhibit was massed, and he had won the second
medal, Hazelton’s was scattered, and he had but one picture on the line;
worse still, the critics gave Hazelton formal praise while they
acclaimed De Vilmarte as the most promising of the younger school of
landscape-painters.
De Vilmarte sought out Hazelton, full of a sense of apology. He found
him gazing morosely into his glass of absinthe like one seeing
unpleasant visions.
“It is really too strong,” Raoul said. “I am sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Hazelton replied, listlessly. “It’s got to stop,
though!” He did not look up, but he felt the shock that traveled through
De Vilmarte’s well-knit body. “It’s got to stop!” he repeated. “It’s too
strong, as you say.”
There was a long silence, a silence full of gravity, full of despair,
the silence of a man who has suddenly and unexpectedly heard his death
sentence, a silence in whose duration De Vilmarte saw his life as it
was. He had begun this as a joke, after his first agonized indecision,
and now suddenly he saw not only his mother but himself involved, and
the honor of his name. He waited for Hazelton to say something—anything,
but Hazelton was chasing chimeras in the depths of his pale drink. As
usual, his resistance was the greater. He sat hunched and red, his black
hair framing his truculent face, unmindful of Raoul.
“It has gone beyond a joke,” was what Raoul finally said.
“That’s just it,” Hazelton agreed. “My God! Think how they have hung
you—think how they have hung me. Where do I get off? Have I got to work
for nothing all my life?”
“The recognition—you know what that means—it means nothing!” cried
Raoul.
Hazelton did not answer.
“But I can’t—confess now!” Raoul’s anguish dragged it out of him. “I
could afford to be a _farceur_—I cannot afford to be a cheat.”
Hazelton looked at him suddenly. Then he laughed. “Ha! ha! The little
birds!” he said. “They stepped in the lime and they gummed up their
little feet, didn’t they?” He lifted up his own small foot, which was
well shod in American shoes. “Poor little bird! Poor little gummed
feet!” He laughed immoderately.
Disgust and shame had their will with Raoul.
Hazelton was enchanted with his own similes, and, unmindful of his
friend’s mood, he placed his small hand next Raoul’s, which was nervous
and brown, the hand of a horseman.
“Can you see the handcuffs linking us?” he chuckled. “‘Linked for Life’
or ‘The Critics’ Revenge.’” He laughed again, but there was bitterness
in his mirth. “We should have told before,” he muttered. “I suppose it
is too late now. I cannot blame you or myself, but, by God! I’m not
going to paint for you all my days. Why should I? We had better stop it,
you know.” He drank deeply. “Courage, my boy!” he cried, setting down
his glass. “I will have the courage to starve my wife if you will have
the courage to disappoint your mother.”
They left it this way.
――――
When De Vilmarte again entered Hazelton’s studio, Hazelton barked at him
ungraciously: “Ho! So you are back!”
“Yes,” said Raoul, “I am back.” He stood leaning upon his cane, very
elegant, very correct, a hint of austerity about him that vanished
charmingly under the sunshine of his smile.
Hazelton continued painting. “Well,” he said, without turning around,
“you have not come, I suppose, for the pleasure of my company; but let
me tell you in advance that I have no time to do any painting for you. I
am not your _bonne à tout faire_.”
By Hazelton’s tone De Vilmarte realized that he was ready to capitulate;
he wanted to be urged, and he desired to make it as disagreeable as he
could because he was not in a position to send De Vilmarte to the devil
any more than De Vilmarte could follow his instinct and leave Hazelton
to come crawling to him—for there was always the chance that Hazelton
might be lucky and would not come crawling.
“It’s your mother again, I suppose,” said Hazelton, ungraciously.
De Vilmarte grew white around his mouth; he grasped his cane until his
hand was bloodless. “Some one unfortunately told her that they were
urging me to have a private exhibition, and her heart is set upon it.”
“There are a number of things upon which my wife’s heart is set,”
Hazelton admitted after a pause, during which he painted with delicate
deliberation and exquisite surety while, fascinated and full of envy, De
Vilmarte watched the delicate hand that seemed to have an independent
existence of its own that seemed to be the utterance of some other and
different personality than that which was expressed in Hazelton’s body.
He turned around suddenly, grinning at De Vilmarte.
“How much are you going to pay for my soul this time?” he asked.
They had never bargained before. In the midst of it Hazelton stopped and
looked De Vilmarte over from top to toe. No detail of his charm and of
his correctness escaped him.
“How are you able to stand it?” he asked. “It must be hard on you, too.”
The thought came to him as something new.
“Oh,” said Raoul, with awful sarcasm, “you think it is hard on me?”
“You must be fond of your mother,” said Hazelton. This time he had not
meant to be brutal, and he was sorry to see De Vilmarte wince, but he
did not know how to mend matters. “How are we going to break through?”
he said. “What end is there for us? I do it for my wife, whom I don’t
love, poor wretch, but for whom I feel damned responsible; and you sell
your soul to please your mother. And do you get nothing for yourself, I
wonder—” He half closed his little eyes, which glinted like jewels
between his black lashes. “Appreciation and applause must be pleasant.
One can buy as much with stolen money as one can with money earned....
There is only one way out—it is for one of us to die, or for one of
_them_. There is death in our little drama, _hein, mon vieux_?”
――――
It was the private exhibition that fixed De Vilmarte’s reputation as an
artist. It also marked in his own mind the precariousness of his
position. And now the matter was complicated for him because he fell in
love with a young girl who cared for his talent as did his mother. She
was one of those proud young daughters of France who had no interest in
rich and idle young men. Each word of her praise was anguish to him. The
praise of the _feuilletons_ he could stand better, because some way they
seemed to have nothing to do with him. It was the price which he paid
willingly for his mother’s happiness.
He cared so much that he had tried not to care for her, and again his
mother intervened. It was in every way a suitable match, and his mother
told him that she did not wish to die without a grandchild. “You have
obligations to your art,” she said, “but your obligations to your race
are above those.”
She was now very feeble. His wedding and his next _Salon_ picture filled
her mind. She was haunted by the presentiment that she would not see the
summer come to its close.
So Raoul would hurry from her room to Hazelton to see how the picture
was coming on. Hazelton was painting as he had never painted before. It
seemed, indeed, as if he had a double personality, and as if each one of
these personalities was trying to outstrip the other. As happens
sometimes to an artist, he had made a sudden leap ahead. No picture that
he had painted had the depth or the beauty or the clear, flowing color
of this one. But he lagged along. It was as though the beauty of the
picture which De Vilmarte was to sign tortured him, and he did not wish
to finish it. He would stand before it, lost in the contemplation of its
excellences like a devotee, refusing to paint.
The picture Hazelton was painting for his own signature was dark and
magnificent, but the picture which he was painting for De Vilmarte had a
singular radiance. It was as though at last Hazelton had painted the
impossible; light shone from that picture. Yet it was not finished. Days
passed, and Hazelton had not brought the picture further toward
completion.
One day when De Vilmarte came in he found Hazelton brooding before it.
He had been drinking. Tears were in his eyes. “It is too beautiful—too
beautiful! Light is more beautiful than darkness. The taste for the
black, the menacing, is the decadent appreciation of a too sheltered
world. I cannot finish this picture for another to sign.”
“No,” De Vilmarte soothed him, “of course not.”
“Oh, my beautiful!” cried Hazelton, addressing his picture. “I cannot
finish you! Come, De Vilmarte, we will drink.”
De Vilmarte went with Hazelton. He watched over him as a mother over her
child. He talked; he reasoned; he sat quiet, white-lipped, while
Hazelton would speculate as to what De Vilmarte got out of it.
“You are, I think, like the victim of a drug,” he said, jeering at De
Vilmarte, his brilliant eyes agleam. That was truer than Hazelton knew.
He could not stop. His mother, his fiancée, his friends, the critics,
his world, expected a picture from him. He visualized them sometimes
pushing him on to some doom of whose exact nature he was ignorant. Again
it was to him as though they dug a dark channel in which his life had to
flow.
Meantime he had to nurse Hazelton’s sick spirit along. He would go with
him as he drank, stand by him in his studio, urging him to paint. In
this way they spent hideous days together.
Hazelton developed a passion for torture. He was tortured himself.
Alcohol tortured him, his embittered nature tortured him. He loved to
see De Vilmarte writhe. He was torn between his desire to finish the
picture and the anguish which he felt at seeing it about to pass into
another’s hands. There were days when its existence hung in the balance.
“You see this palette-knife,” he would tell De Vilmarte, “and this
palette of dark paint? A twist, my friend, a little twist of the knife
and a little splash, and where is this luminous radiance? Gone!” And he
would watch De Vilmarte as he let his brush hover over the brilliant
surface.
How it hurt Raoul he knew, because when he thought of destroying the
picture it was as though a knife were twisted in his own heart.
One afternoon De Vilmarte nursed Hazelton from café to café, listening
to his noble braggadocio.
“Remember,” Hazelton urged Raoul, “the wonderful Mongolian legend of the
father and son who loved the same woman, and whom for their honor they
threw over a cliff! That’s the idea—the cliff! You shall throw our love
over the cliff—you shall destroy the picture yourself. Come back with
me!” He was as though possessed. Full of apprehension, De Vilmarte
followed him.
They stood before the picture. It shone out as though indeed light came
from it. Hazelton put the palette into De Vilmarte’s hand.
“Now, my friend, go to it!” he cried. “Paint, De Vilmarte—paint in your
own natural manner! A few strokes of the brush of the great master De
Vilmarte, and color and light will vanish from it. Why not—why not? You
suffer, too—your face is drawn. You think I do not know how you hate me.
I don’t need to look at you to know that. We always hate those who have
power over us. Paint—paint! If I can bear it, surely you can. _Paint
naturally_, De Vilmarte! Paint into it your own meagerness and banality!
Paint into my masterpiece the signature of your own defeat.”
The afternoon was ebbing. It seemed as though the room were full of
silent people, all holding Raoul back—his world, the critics, his
fiancée, his mother. Besides, he had no right to destroy this beautiful
thing to save his honor.
“You are not yourself,” he said.
“Aha! I know what you think of me. Ha! De Vilmarte, but I am a master, a
great painter. Paint, and betray yourself. Ha! _sale voyou_, you will
not? You are waiting to steal from me my final beautiful expression. You
stand there— How is it that you permit me to call the Vicomte de la Tour
de Vilmarte names? Why do you not strike me?”
“Oh, call me what you like,” Raoul cried. “Only finish the picture.
There is very little more to do.”
“I tell you what I shall call you,” Hazelton jeered at him. “I will call
you nothing worse than Raoul—Ra-oul—Ra—o—u—l!” He meowed it like a
tom-cat. “How can I be so vile when I paint like an angel, Ra—o—u—l ...
Ra—o—u—l!”
Sweat stood on Raoul’s forehead. He stood quiet. The picture was
finished.
“Sign, my little Raoul, sign!” cried Hazelton. And with murder in his
heart, a bitter tide of dark and sluggish blood mounting, ever mounting,
Raoul signed and then fled into the lovely spring evening.
“This is the end,” he thought. “There shall be no more of this. Not for
any one—not for any one, can I be so defiled!” For he felt the mystic
identity between himself and his mother—that he was flesh of her flesh,
and that in some vicarious way she was being insulted through him.
But it was not the end. It was with horror that Raoul learned that the
picture had been bought by the state, that he was to receive the Legion
of Honor. His mother was wild with joy.
“Now,” she cried, embracing him—“now I can depart in peace.” She looked
so fragile that it seemed as if indeed her spirit had lingered only for
this joy. She looked at him narrowly. “But you have been working too
hard—you look ill. A long rest is what you need.”
“A very long rest,” Raoul agreed. He left the house, and, as if it was a
magnet, the great exhibition drew him to it, and in front of his picture
stood the thick, familiar figure of Hazelton, his nose jutting out
truculently from his face, which was red and black like a poster. He
broke through his attitude of devoted contemplation to turn upon Raoul.
“Bought by the state!” he cried. “To be hung in the Luxembourg!” He
pointed menacingly with his cane at De Vilmarte’s neat little signature.
“Why, I ask, should I go to my grave unknown, poor, a pensioner of your
bounty? Why should you be happy—fêted?”
The irony of being accused of happiness was too much for De Vilmarte. He
laughed aloud.
“Wouldn’t it be better for you to be an honest man?” croaked Hazelton.
“Only death can make an honest man of me,” answered De Vilmarte.
“_My_ death could make an honest man of you,” Hazelton said slowly. It
was as if he had read the dark and nameless secret that was lurking in
the bottom of De Vilmarte’s heart.
For a moment they two seemed alone in all the earth, the only living
beings. They stood alone, their secret in their hands.
Then Hazelton’s lips began to move. “My God!” he said. “Bought by the
state and hung in the Luxembourg! Bought by the state and hung in the
Luxembourg!” He repeated it as if trying to familiarize himself with
some inexplicable fact. “I will not have it!” he went on. “I will not
have it! If I’m not bought by the state I shall not go on!”
Raoul looked at him with entreaty. Hazelton came up to the surface of
consciousness and his eyes followed Raoul’s. A very frail little old
lady was being pushed in a wheel-chair near them.
“My mother,” Raoul whispered.
“I wish to meet her,” said Hazelton.
She bowed graciously and then sat in her chair gazing at the picture
bought by the state. Pride was in every line of her old face. She seemed
returned from the shadows only to gaze at this picture. Then, in a voice
which was cracked with age, she said, turning to Hazelton:
“I know your work, too. Monsieur—the opposite of my son’s. It is as
though between you you encompassed all of nature’s moods. To me there
has always been—you will laugh I know—a strange similarity, as though
you were two halves of a whole, as day and night.”
A cold wave flowed over Hazelton, a feeling as though his hair were
lifting on the back of his head. It was as though this frail old lady
was linking him irrevocably to Raoul. He was powerless now to take his
own.
“Madame,” he said, “I feel as if no one had understood my work before.”
But she had turned to gaze upon her son’s painting. A sort of senility
enveloped her, and his drunkenness reached out to it. His gaze had in it
respect and tenderness and abnegation. His manner, more eloquent than
words, said: “I give up; I resign. Take it.”
He went to the end of the gallery, and Raoul saw him sit down in the
attitude of one who waits. When Mme. de Vilmarte left, Raoul joined him.
Hazelton’s head sank deeply between his shoulders; his pugnacity had
oozed away. After a time he spoke with an effort. “I understand,” he
said. “I understand—”
A curious sense of liberation seized De Vilmarte. His old liking for
Hazelton returned. “I am sorry for all of us,” he said.
“My poor friend, there is no way out,” said Hazelton. “I am vile—a
beast. But trust me—believe in me.”
“I will,” cried De Vilmarte, deeply touched.
Hazelton’s little jewel-like eyes were blurred with unwonted sentiment.
“I am a king in exile,” he muttered over and over. “A king in exile,” he
repeated. This sentimental simile seemed to be a well of bitter comfort
for him.
This story should end here, for stories should end like this, on the
high note; but life is different. Hazelton was a man with a bad liver,
and he got no joy from his sacrifice. Moreover, in real life one seldom
fights a decisive battle with one’s lower nature. One goes on fighting;
it dies hard when it dies at all. There are the high moments when one
thinks the battle won, and the next day the enemy attacks again, with
the battle to be fought over.
Hazelton had formed the habit of cursing fate and De Vilmarte, and, to
revenge himself, of threatening De Vilmarte’s exposure, and he continued
to do these things. And De Vilmarte let his mind stray far in
contemplating Hazelton’s possible vileness, and in doing this he himself
became vile. What he could not recognize was the definite place where
Hazelton’s vileness stopped. His life was like a fair fruit rotten
within.
It was the summer of 1914, and Hazelton, whose drunkenness before had
been occasional, now drank always, and forever in the background of De
Vilmarte’s mind was this powerful figure with its red face and black
hair and truculent bearing, drunken and obscene, who carried in his
careless hand the honor of the De Vilmartes. At any moment Hazelton
could rob Raoul of his pride, embitter his mother’s last hours, and make
him the laughing stock of his world. Raoul became like an entrapped
animal running around and around the implacable barriers of a cage. It
is a terrible thing to have one’s honor in the hands of another.
He thought of everything that might end this torment, and he found no
answer. Madness grew in him. Wherever Raoul de la Tour de Vilmarte went,
there followed him unseen a shadow, swart, dark, and red-faced. It
followed him, mouthing, “Ra-o-u-l—Ra-o-u-l!” like a cat. “Ra-o-u-l!
Ra-o-u-l!” from morning till night. When De Vilmarte was at a table in a
café a huge and mocking shadow sat beside him, and it said, wagging its
head in a horrid fashion, “There’s death in our little drama, _hein, mon
vieux_?”
The fate that had made their interests one, bound them together. They
sought each other out to spend strange and tortured hours in each
other’s company, while in the depths of Raoul’s heart a plan to end the
torture was coming to its own slow maturity, and grew large and dark
during the hot days of July. He could not continue to live. The burden
of his secret weighed him down. Nor could he leave Hazelton behind him,
the honor of the De Vilmartes in his hands.
The bloody answer to the riddle leaped out at him. Hazelton’s death—that
was the answer. Then De Vilmarte could depart in peace. For two mad,
happy days he saw life simply. First Hazelton, then himself.
One day he stopped short, for he realized he could not go until his
mother—went. He must stay a while—until she died.
He had to wait until she died. He watched her, wondering if his
endurance would outlast her life. He tried not to let her see him
watching—for he knew there was madness in his eyes—and he would go out
to find his dark shadow, for often it was less painful to be with him
than away from him—he knew then what Hazelton was up to. He spent days
in retracing the steps which had brought him to this desperate
_impasse_. They had been easy, but he knew that weakness was at the
bottom of it—perhaps, unless he did it now, he would never do it—perhaps
an unworthy desire for life—and love—might hold back his hand.
So De Vilmarte lived his days and nights bound on the torturing pendulum
of conflict.
――――
Suddenly Europe was aflame. France stood still and waited. And as he
waited, with Europe, Raoul for a moment forgot his torment. War is a
great destroyer, but among other things it destroys the smaller
emotions. Its licking flame shrivels up personal loves and hates. When
war was declared, old hates were blotted out, and hopeless lovers
trembling on the brink of suicide were cured overnight. Small human
atoms were drowned in the larger hate and the larger love. Men ceased to
have power over their own lives since their lives belonged to France.
So when war was declared, choice was taken from Raoul’s hands. A high
feeling of liberation possessed him. He walked along the street, and
suddenly he realized that instead of going toward his home he was
seeking his other half, the dark shadow to whom he had been so bound.
On Hazelton’s door a note was pinned, addressed to him.
“My friend,” it said, “you have luck! You will have your regiment, while
nothing better than the ambulance, like a _sale embusque_, for me. If
harm comes to you, don’t fear for your mother.”
This letter made him feel as though Hazelton had clasped his hand. He no
longer felt toward Hazelton as an enemy, since France had also claimed
him.
Madness had brushed him with its dark wings. By so slender a thread his
life and Hazelton’s had hung! Yes—and his honor!
“Thank God!” he said, “for an honorable death!” It was the last personal
thought that was his for a long time. War engulfed him. Instead of an
individual he was a soldier of France, and his life was broken away from
the old life which now seemed illusion, the days which streamed past him
like pennants torn in the wind.
Later, in the monotony of trench warfare, he had time to think of
Hazelton. He desired two things—to serve France, and to see Hazelton.
Raoul wanted a word of friendship to pass between them, and especially
he wanted to tell Hazelton that he need not worry about his wife. He
wrote to him, but got no answer. Life went on; war had become the normal
thing. The complexities of his former life receded further and further
from him, and became more phantasmal, but the desire to see Hazelton
before either of them should die remained with Raoul.
When he was wounded it was his last conscious thought before oblivion
engulfed him. There followed a half-waking—pain—a penumbral land through
which shapes moved vaguely; the smell of an anesthetic, an awakening,
and again sleep. When he wakened fully he was in a white hospital ward
with a sister bending over him.
“In the next bed,” she said, “there is a _grand blessé_.” She looked at
him significantly. “He wishes to speak to you—he is a friend of yours.”
In the next bed lay Hazelton, the startling black of his shaggy hair
framing the pallor of his face.
With difficulty Raoul raised his head. They smiled at each other. From
the communion of their silence came Hazelton’s deep voice.
“Why the devil,” he said, “did we ever hate each other?”
Raoul shook his head. He didn’t know. He, too, had wanted to ask
Hazelton this.
“It has bothered me,” said Hazelton. “I wanted to see you—” His voice
trailed off. “I’ve wanted to ask you why we have needed this
war—death—to make us know we don’t hate each other.”
“I don’t know,” said De Vilmarte. It was an effort for him to speak; his
voice sounded frail and broken.
“Raoul,” Hazelton asked, tenderly, “where are you wounded? Is it bad?”
“I don’t know,” Raoul answered again.
“It’s his head,” the sister answered for him, “and his right hand.”
Hazelton raised his great head; a red mounted to his face; his old
sardonic laughter boomed out through the ward. With a sharply indrawn
breath of pain: “Oh, la—la!” he shouted. “_’Cré nom! ’Cré nom!_ What
luck—imperishable! I’m dying—your right hand—your _right_ hand!” He sank
back, his ironic laughter drowned in a swift crimson tide.
The nurse beckoned to an orderly to bring a screen....
Tears of grief and weakness streamed down Raoul’s face. To the last his
ill luck had held. He hadn’t been able to make his friend understand, or
to make amends. His right hand was wounded, and he could no longer serve
France.
The sister looked at him with pity. She tried to console him.
“Death is not always so mercifully quick with these strong men,” she
said.