The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 56

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 cafe to cafe, listening to his n.o.ble 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 ba.n.a.lity!

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 fiancee, 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 ident.i.ty 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 att.i.tude 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-feted?"

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 G.o.d!" 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 encompa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 cafe a huge and mocking shadow sat beside him, and it said, wagging its head in a horrid fas.h.i.+on, "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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 _impa.s.se_. 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.