The name of Daniel Garford had figured on many occasions in the
scare-heads of the Metropolitan press, not only on account of the
eccentricities of genius and the wildness of his youth, but from
the fact that the name of Garford had been a social beacon for
generations. Even before the Mexican War there had been a Garford
who had sat in the Cabinet as Secretary of State, and from that
time on, the family had progressed in power and wealth, a proud,
intensely ambitious, self-willed, and dominating line of men, who,
whatever their faults, were never accused of idleness. There was a
restless, mental energy about these men which had driven them to
the front, while the strength of the old Garford strain continued
to show in their impatience of forms and traditions, their ability
to originate and discover, and especially in their distinguishing
trait of never being satisfied with success.
The Honorable Benjamin Garford, Daniel’s uncle, whom he resembled,
according to the incomprehensible vagaries of heredity in form
and temperament, had been a clear example of this boundless craze
for real achievement. Though possessed of an ample fortune, he
had, from his youth, devoted himself to scientific research and
discussion. One of the most distinguished scholars of his day,
honored by numerous European scientific bodies for discoveries
in the field of electrical energy, his text-books accepted as
standards, twice minister to St. Petersburg, and once to Paris,
he summed up his life in one little phrase: “I die a disappointed
man.” This remark, incomprehensible to the multitude, should be
retained as the key to Daniel’s character--the passionate pursuit
of an ideal linked to an inevitable moment of self-appraisement and
disillusion.
His life had been enveloped in storm, a whirling, breathless
existence, with strange reversals of fortune, never quiet, nor
long continuing along obvious lines. The quality of genius had
always been in him from the lonely, tragic days of his boyhood,
but a disordered, tormented genius which had made him the sport
of accidental influences. Dudley Garford, his father, in a moment
of intense infatuation in his early twenties, had eloped with and
married a beautiful Italian girl of distinguished parentage whom
he had met in his travels, and this mixture of the virility of the
Garfords with the warmth and color of the South had made a genius
of the boy. To this fortuitous mingling of rich strains was added
the awakening touch of early sorrow and a precocious comprehension
of tragedy. What father and mother had consummated in a burst of
wildness, they lived to destroy in bitterness. From the earliest
years of their marriage, violent quarrels had broken out, due
at first to the unreasoning espionage of passionate jealousy to
which the wife subjected the husband, and, later, inevitably to a
succession of rapid, volatile attachments into which the husband
had been driven, first, by her intolerance, and second, by the
brilliant pleasure-loving qualities of his own forceful personality.
Daniel and his sister Theresa grew up in this unruly household,
wide-eyed, wondering spectators of daily storms, culminating
in one tragic evening when the mother, face to face at last
with the acknowledged proofs of her husband’s infidelity, had
abandoned herself to such a tempest of blind rage that the two
children, cowering against the wall, too frightened to do aught
but to cling to each other, were forced to witness the frantic
struggle of their father with the mother who, in her hysteria,
was bent on self-destruction. The scene (it had taken place in the
nursery) remained in the boy’s mind with the startling horror of a
nightmare--the childish toys scattered on the floor, the words of
hatred and anger which struck them cold, the frightful distortion
on the face of their mother, the struggle for the possession of
the knife, and then her exhaustion, the low moaning broken by
hysterical gasps for breath. Then, weeks later had come the parting
which he did not understand in the least, for which he could find
no childish reason. The little sister and the stately, resplendent
mother had gone out of his life, and loneliness and silence had
crept through the great house.
The boy grew up in this abandonment, brooding over memories, his
imagination precociously awakened, forced into a searching of
himself; self-sufficient, wandering into long explorations of the
realms of the fantastic, telling himself stories at night, the
despair and terror of a succession of tutors. What he saw and
dimly comprehended during this period was a curious awakening to
the conflict of the greed and passions of the later world. Many a
night, unsuspected, he had stolen from his bed and secreted himself
in the little balcony that looked down on the great drawing-room,
gazing down with a puzzled wonder on the tempestuous scenes of
revel and license which hid the darker side of Dudley Garford’s
mercurial, triumphant public career. He saw his father with
critical eyes, with an unhealthy knowledge beyond the weight of his
years, and this hidden critical spectatorship made life seem to him
like some whirling theatric _danse macabre_ of riotous emotions and
vibrant colors.
Already, the exotic multiplied sensations had become translated
into the bent of his imagination. He had begun to model in clay,
untaught, following queer fancies; struggling to the use of
childish paints, understanding nothing of mediums but delighting
his eyes with odd blending and contrasts of colors, violent and
barbaric in his instincts.
One night, in the weariness of his watching, he fell asleep in
the balcony, was discovered, and the next week was bundled off to
boarding school.
His career at school was cut abruptly at the age of sixteen by
the discovery of his infatuation for the daughter of one of his
teachers, a woman many years his senior with whom he had fallen
violently, desperately in love, with all the unreason and blind
adoration of a first passion. Brilliant, unruly, proud, delicate in
health, and too absorbed in reading and the pursuit of his beloved
painting, he had still about him a certain illuminating magnetism,
a faith in his future, a trick of saying things others would never
have said, of thinking strange thoughts that had even reached to
the heart of the woman. To do her justice, she had never thought
for a moment of taking advantage of the boy’s infatuation; yet
the parting was difficult, and she herself suffered more than she
showed.
For two years he was consigned to a ranch, to live in the open air,
to harden to the weather and grow in muscle and sturdiness, roaming
the great stretches, sleeping in the open, discovering that beyond
the stone walls of the city, such miracles exist as the turning
of the dawn, the riotous coming of the sun, the trackless map of
stars, the restless stealing-in of the spring and the haunting
majesty of the turning leaves. All these sensations sunk deep into
his fertile imagination. An artist exiled in the fight for health
gave him the first lessons, and put him through the hard grind of
mechanical preparation. From the first he showed qualities which
were to persist in his later work, an impatience with deliberate
building and an impulse toward the dramatic interpretation of
the instincts. His sketches were full of technical faults, and
yet almost all held a certain charm, something quite out of the
ordinary.
From this serene calm of the open plain and a life of simple
moods, he was suddenly transplanted to college in the midst of
a fast New York set, with possession of an allowance which was
quite sufficient to send him headlong to his own destruction. The
tendency to violent extremes which was instinctive in his character
made him speedily the ring-leader in the company of those who
burned the midnight oil--but not in the pursuit of knowledge. In
six months Daniel had been twice warned by the faculty and had
managed to run through the year’s allowance. He applied for further
funds to his father, who laughed and acceded, rather pleased, in
his worldly way, that his son was sowing his wild oats in princely
fashion. In his second year, his disordered existence had become
so notorious that, after a certain episode which had figured
prominently in the newspapers, wherein he had driven a coach over
the front lawns of suburban Boston in the wee hours of the morning,
he was summarily called before the faculty and given an opportunity
to resign. On top of which came a telegram from New York summoning
him to his father’s death-bed.
A certain mystery surrounded the death of Dudley Garford, which
was officially given out as the result of an aggravated case of
appendicitis. It was whispered that he had come by a violent
death, having been shot through the lungs by an outraged husband.
Certainly the habits of his later life would not have made such a
result an improbability.
Daniel had never known his father, conscious always in the rare
moments of their intercourse of an insuperable barrier which lay
between them in the memories of his boyhood. In the last months,
they had even come to the verge of an open quarrel, when the father
had discovered the strength of the son’s artistic inclinations and
had violently forbidden him a career which he looked upon with
contempt.
Daniel now found himself his own master, with every avenue opened
to his wish. He went to Paris. His mother, after the early death
of his sister, had remarried and become the Duchesse de Senbach.
Into this curious intermingling of international society which
flaunts its vanities and worn passions, he entered with all the
ardor of a healthy body and a lively imagination, still genuinely
blinded with illusions. The artist in him, which divides life into
sensations, again brought him into notoriety. He gave dinners as
a grand duke might give; he lived in apartments with a retinue
of servants, the cost of which was faithfully chronicled in the
colored Sunday editions of his home papers with printed references
to the rake’s progress. He was surrounded by a crowd of sycophants,
shoddy race-track majors, princes down at the heels, and Balkan
aristocrats of the gaming-tables, who fattened on his prodigality
and led him into fresh excesses. He fell violently in love with a
favorite of the _Café Chantants_, Nina de Mauban, believed in her
devotion to him, conceived the quixotic idea of lifting her out of
the muddied existence she led and even announced their engagement.
* * * * *
The existence he had been living would have inevitably ruined him,
when a new turn arrived with the panic of ’93. In a fortnight,
as a result of the treachery of an executor, he found himself
bankrupt. The news made a sensation here and abroad. The army of
friends melted away. Creditors descended on him and drove him from
his palace, and the woman he had adored departed overnight in the
company of a Swedish count. When the news was brought to him, he
began by flying into a paroxysm of despair and ended by bursting
into laughter. The next day, with the best of good humor, he packed
up his effects and moved over into a studio in the Rue d’Assas
off the Luxembourg Gardens. His mother gave him an allowance of
one hundred dollars a month, which, in his new surroundings, was a
fortune. In a month he had found his happiness in a life of work
among these democrats of the soul.
If he did not at once forget the woman, the memory of his existence
of luxury never returned to embitter him. For years he lived with
his comrades of the _atelier_, adopting their flowing dress and
easy customs, a leader in their revelries, but a madman for work,
as completely divorced from his past existence as though he had
died and been born again. The two experiences as a boy and as a
man had left him distrustful of women or, at least, recoiling
before the intense outpouring of emotion which love meant to him.
During this long student period, no woman touched his heart beyond
a womanly sympathy. In fact, his attitude was the occasion of
numerous jests among the more catholicly inclined, while those of
more romantic persuasion did him the honor to ascribe it to the
tragedy of a “_grande passion_.” His studio, which was magnificent
for the quarter, became the refuge of the whole tribe of models and
others whose living was even more precarious. At any hour of the
day and night, they arrived for a bit of food, a night’s shelter,
or to give him their tragic confidence, and these flitting children
of the sidewalks, cynical, hardened, and sly in their dealings
with other men, would melt into tears or burst into angry tirades
against the injustice of established order, sitting alone with
him into the long night. They taught him much of their dreadful
vision of mankind and suffering in such hours of confession, which
he would never have known had he approached them differently. At
the bottom, pity was too deep in his soul to have permitted any
other sentiment. All adored him and one, Pepita, a little Spanish
model, loved him with the love of a dog for its master. For his
part, he took no credit for this open charity. As a matter of fact,
it was a privileged glance into a hidden life, that interested
him intensely, that roused in him long periods of meditation and
revolt, that was as much a part of the architectural structure
of his artistic conscience, as his boyhood, his life on the
prairies, his wildness at college, or his rapid plunge through the
dissipations of the brilliant world. He became known not only as an
artist of bold and daring originality, but as a man who thought and
reasoned.
In his third year, an event came which occasioned a new outburst
of public curiosity. An aunt died and left him a legacy of
fifty thousand dollars. He reappeared in society in a brilliant
renaissance, took up his old habits, just as though nothing had
happened; reassembled the former acquaintances, gave dinners and
balls, and won enormous sums at baccarat. This lasted for almost
two months, at the end of which a streak of luck set in against
him and he found himself again bankrupt. Seven weeks after his
departure from the studio of the Rue d’Assas, he returned penniless
but happy, and announced:
“Now, if no more aunts die, I shall become an artist.”
His return was made a gala night; the quarter packed in to hear his
adventures, and, in the end, the renegade was received back into
the sacred enclosure, while his dress clothes and the offending hat
were burned with imposing ceremonies.
* * * * *
When the death of his mother brought him a fortune, he remained
true to his oath and the left bank of the Seine. By this time he
had won his medals in the Salon and had achieved the honor of a
private exhibition of water-colors which he had brought back from
Algeria and the East. There were some critics who complained of the
theatric quality of his art, but all conceded the individuality
and the boldness of his new conceptions. His sudden spring into
fame was as instantaneous as all the other phases of his existence.
Everything seemed to open ahead of him for a long and brilliant
career of highest achievement, when fate, which had played him a
dozen queer turns, returned to intrude once more into his existence.
He was motoring along the Riviera, on a trip he had long planned
to Venice and the galleries of Florence, when, as his car swerved
out and around a jutting corner of rock, a sudden gust of wind
caught his hat and whirled it into the lap of a young woman who
was passing in a phaeton. This gust of wind decided his whole
life. He fell in love with her at the first sight of her wistful
Madonnalike face and trusting eyes, that strangely enough reminded
him of the idealized vision of his boyhood. She was a divorcée,
scarcely twenty-one, from the South, who had resumed her maiden
name, Louise Fortier. He knew absolutely nothing about her except
the story she told of childish innocence and the whims of a selfish
libertine. Two weeks later, they returned to Paris, engaged. He
had thrown himself into this new experience without the slightest
distrust, with the rapturous idolatry of the boy he was. He would
not have permitted her to be discussed even by his most intimate
friends, though, in fact, several made hints which he was too blind
to perceive. They were married a month later. One painful incident
occurred. Pepita, the little Spanish model who had been devoted to
him for years, attempted to take her life by swallowing poison, and
though her act was detected in time to save her, the occurrence
cast a shadow over the wedding.
During the first months, he found himself incomprehensibly,
riotously happy. He was charmed and bewildered by his wife. They
made a romantic trip through Italy and into the East, during which
she assumed subtly a great influence over his moods and ambitions.
When they returned to Paris, he was more in love than ever; only,
there was one thing which had gone completely out of his day, of
which he never thought--his work. Their coming to New York was her
suggestion. The return home was a triumph for him. For the first
time, he tasted the completeness of personal success. His friends
of the quarter who had returned before him hailed him as a leader.
He became a personality; his eccentricities of speech and thought,
the dramatic wildness, even, of his past life were now registered
in his favor. He took a studio and began to work, and success
continued his. Yet, at the bottom, he became conscious of a growing
restlessness, of an inability to enjoy what he had won.
Gradually, the obsession which had clouded his vision began to
lift from his eyes. He saw her as she was, this woman to whom he
had chosen to fasten the chains of his existence. He was proud of
her, of her charm, of the magnetism she exerted over other men,
of the admiration she evoked in the brilliant formal society into
which she had led him, but he perceived at last that she neither
understood what he was working for nor was able to assist him in
the least. He found himself divided against himself, as it were,
leading two opposite lives.
He began to ask himself questions. He said to himself that he was
famous and envied, that everything he did succeeded, and that
yet he was not happy. He sought in himself some explanation. He
recalled two sayings, one that of his uncle who, at the end of a
life heaped with honors, could say: “I die a disappointed man,”
and the remark of his old professor: “In art, the critical age is
forty, up to then one can promise, after then one must achieve.”
He began to feel this crisis in his life, to ask himself whether
he had in him the strength to revolt or whether he would renounce
the ambitious flights of his old ideals in the easy satisfaction
of what the public called success. For he perceived clearly that
the fault lay in him, that he no longer lived in his art, that he
served two gods, and that in this divided allegiance lay the death
of all his struggling toward true greatness. He sought to make his
wife understand and found a blank incomprehension. Then he tried to
order his life on new lines, to divide the year into two parts, and
to regain in solitary summers on unfrequented islands something of
the old enthusiastic concentration.
But he found that the habits of home, of pleasant friends, of the
woman who held him by mysterious impulses, were too strong, and he
came to the day when he understood his uncle, and said to himself:
“It is ended. I shall not do what I want to do. It is beyond me, as
my life has been cast.”
A profound melancholy came over him and, in his secret heart,
undivined by his closest friends the cancer of disillusionment
began to grow. His eccentricities increased. He had scenes with his
wife in which he burst into violent tirades or scornful laughter
which she could not understand. Though he never accused her, he
repeated often bitterly to himself that his career was a sacrifice
to the woman, who neither appreciated nor perceived the sacrifice.
During these years, he had never, for an instant, entertained the
slightest suspicion of his wife. He gave her absolute faith. His
theory of marriage was not as a reciprocal tyranny but as a free
union. He did not claim any right over her actions or attempt to
limit her interests in other men. In the beginning he had explained
himself at length.
“If the day ever comes when you find that you love another man,
come to me and tell me,” he said. “I shall not stand in your way,
no matter how I may feel. Marriage exists only so long as it is
voluntary on both sides. All I demand is that there should be no
deceit, that each should remember the dignity of the other.”
“If you say that you don’t love me!” she said, laughing, but a
little anxious.
“You are wrong; I love you in my own way.”
She was silent quite a while, watching him.
“And if--if the other thing should happen,” she said, pretending to
make a jest of it. “If I did deceive you, what would you do?”
“Don’t joke about such things,” he said, frowning; “I am serious,
Louise.”
Several times, as though to tease him, she came back to this
question, but each time peremptorily he refused to discuss it.
He was not jealous, or, rather, he held jealousy unworthy of him.
He would have scorned to exercise the slightest supervision over
his wife’s actions. On one occasion, when he had taken up a branch
telephone, he had cut in on a conversation which would have aroused
any one but a man as blind or as loyal as he was. He had replaced
the receiver. He would have been ashamed to listen, and even
referred to it jestingly, without notice of the alarm which showed
in her eyes. One afternoon, coming home contrary to his habit, he
let himself into his apartment and stopped at the sound of voices
from his wife’s salon. He listened and discovered, without shadow
of a doubt, that the man with whom she was arguing was her lover.