The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 55

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 ma.s.sed, 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d! 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 G.o.d! 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 gla.s.s. "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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 a 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 d.a.m.ned 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 pa.s.sed, 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 fiancee, his friends, the critics, his world, expected a picture from him. He visualized them sometimes pus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.s 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.