Chapter V (5)

For a moment all of us were too thunderstruck to speak. Somehow the picture he had given us did not seem to be that of an assassin, as one imagines such a man.

“You mean to say,” asked the man by the window slowly, “that this very boy you’ve been telling us about was the one who shot the Archduke?”

“Yes,” said the other, “he was Gavrilo Prinzip of Sarajevo.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed the third. “The boy who brought on the war!”

“As we were saying earlier,” returned the one who had told the tale, “historians will doubtless trace the beginnings of the war to Gavrilo’s shot. Certainly Austria used the shot as her excuse, alleging that a plot to kill the Archduke had been hatched in Serbia—which was absolutely untrue, for Serbia was afraid of nothing so much as of giving offense to Austria, knowing well that Austria was only seeking a pretext to pounce upon her, precisely as she had earlier pounced upon Bosnia and Herzegovina, annexing them.”

After a thoughtful pause he added: “Poor Gavrilo! I am glad to know that he is free at last. Like Mara’s starling, he was not one to live long in a cage. And it is perhaps because I was so fond of him, and also because Austria’s excuse was so transparently despicable, that I shall always go behind the shooting in thinking of the beginning of the war. As I conceive it, it was Mara’s anger that released Gavrilo from the promise which, otherwise, would have withheld him. And it was the death of the caged starling that brought on her anger. And it was the animalculæ that caused the bird’s death.”

“That is,” put in the man by the window, “you prefer to trace the war down to such a small beginning as the death of that caged bird?”

“Rather,” replied the other, “to a still smaller and more repulsive beginning—to the vermin which destroyed the bird. It seems to me I see them always crawling through the explanations, apologies, excuses, war messages, and peace overtures of the Teutonic autocrats.”

AT ISHAM’S

_By_ EDWARD C. VENABLE From _Scribner’s Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner’s Sons._ _Copyright, 1919, by Edward C. Venable._

It was a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things. It was not, of course, advertised as that; there was no sign to the public saying as much. Indeed, the only sign of any sort said “Wines, Ales, and Liquors,” just below the name “Isham.” But, nevertheless, that is what it distinctively was—a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things.

It was a curious place to look at, too, in a way—the wrong way. It was a three-story house among houses fifteen, twenty, and thirty stories high; it was a house sixty years old, living usefully among houses, most of which were scarcely as many months old. But sixty years is no great age for a house in most places, and three stories is not out of the common. It is thirty stories that are extraordinary. In the right way Isham’s was a very ordinary place to look at, in very curious surroundings—only it took a moment’s thought to find it out.

Old Isham himself, though, would have been curious anywhere in the world. He was seventy years old, and he looked precocious. Perhaps having lived so long in an atmosphere of “wild surmise” had robbed him of the gift of wonderment, the last light of infancy to go out in the world, and so he was absolutely grown up. That is what he was, absolutely grown up. Looking into his face you could not imagine his ever being surprised, quite without a previous experience of the present. As one of his customers said, he could take the gayest dinner-party that ever was, and with a single glance of his faded blue eyes reduce it to a pile of dirty dishes and the bill. He was saturated with the gayety of thirty thousand dinners. He never condescended to the vulgarity of a dress suit, but always wore plain black with immaculate linen. So he would move in the evening, ponderously—for he must have weighed two hundred pounds—among the tables, listening imperturbably to praise and blame. Yes, chops were almost always properly broiled, beer had been flat from the beginning of the world—Lucullus with a dash of Cato.

Twinkle Sampson was his oldest patron. He was as old as Isham, and had been dining there once or twice a week ever since he was thirty; but he was the antithesis of Isham in appearance. He had the face of a very young child; it was all wonderment. The whole world was for him a wild surmise. His hobby was astronomy. He liked, as he said, to talk about the moon. Any of the heavenly bodies would interest him, but the moon was his own peculiar sphere. His knowledge was for the most laboriously gleaned, unassisted, from books; but twice in his life he had looked at the moon through a great telescope, and those two occasions were to Twinkle Sampson what one wedding and one funeral are to most men. He looked like a moon-lover, too, a pale, weak reflection of masculinity. The nearest he ever got to anger was when some ignorant person at Isham’s threatened to divert the talk from his hobby when once he had dragged it thither.

“I know a man—,” began one of these imprudently on one occasion.

“We don’t care if you know a million men,” interrupted Twinkle. “We want to talk about the moon.”

And he sat for five minutes thereafter, blinking at the interloper like an exasperated white-haired owl. Even in that outburst, though, he characteristically took refuge in the plural.

Such little “flare-ups” were very, very frequent at Isham’s. Indeed, they were inevitable, because there people talked of what they had thought about. It is the talk for talk’s sake that is only a string of wearying agreements; the drunkard over a bar, a débutante at a dinner-table, a statesman among his constituents. Talk at Isham’s was intelligently sharp, interrupted, disputative. And, in any case, Savelle would have made it so. He was eaten up by the zeal of his cause, which was Christianity and capitalism. Capitalism, he preached, was founded on Christianity, was a development and an inevitable development of the social implication of the Gospels. It was a curious plea; it had the power of exasperating human beings otherwise kindly and meditative, such as chiefly affected Isham’s, to something like fury when Savelle eloquently expounded it. He called it Christian economics. He argued that just as Christianity was developing the social relations of human beings to one of pure love, so it was developing also their economical relations to one of pure trust. The two developments had gone on side by side throughout the Christian era, from the days when merchants hauled ponderous “talents of silver” about with them in their trading, until now, when one could control all the wealth of the world by the tapping of a telegraph key. And not only was their growth thus synchronous, but each was the exactest exponent of the other; it was only in Christian countries, he explained, that the capitalistic system was to be found at all, and in the quasi-heathen it was invariably established in exact proportion with the spread of Christian ethics. He was full, too, of frequent instances and recondite dates, such as the invention of the bill of exchange by the Hebrews, and the advice of Jesus to his Apostles anent carrying money about with them. There were only two crimes in Christian economics, just as in the ethics; dishonesty, which he claimed was the commercial form of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and bankruptcy, or the refusal of trust, which was simply a denial of the economic implication of the teaching of love one another. Socialism, of course, was merely a new, subtle sacrilege, and Marx the newest incarnation of anti-Christ. His faith or fanaticism would always burn its fiercest in talking of these specific instances. Twinkle Sampson would sit blinking astigmatically at him for an hour in silence when he preached so. He was the only man of them all whom Twinkle Sampson never interrupted, never tried to drag away to the moon.

It was only an occasional horrified Christian or exasperated Socialist who ever diverted him, and then he would descend to embittering personalities with disconcerting quickness. He was of French descent, Gascon, a tall, fair, pale man, and had the racial instinct for combat. In the daytime he was the Wall Street reporter for one of the evening dailies, and people who knew him down there said he went about his work in that district like a pious pilgrim in Judea. But what you did daytimes never mattered at Isham’s. It was what you could say evenings after dinner, in the back of the dining-room beside the bar, that counted, and there Savelle, next to Twinkle, was the best listened-to man in Isham’s.

And, measured by that scale, little Norvel was his farthest neighbor. He was the least listened-to man, because he rarely spoke, and the best listener. Indeed, he was the only genuine listener. The others listened only under _force majeure_. He, on the contrary, would dine sparely, for he was very poor, apparently, and sit smoking all evening until ten o’clock, and go away without ever speaking to any one, except the waiter who served, and a “Good evening” and “Good night” to Mr. Isham himself. His prestige was due solely to one effort. He had propounded a query which Isham’s had discussed more than any other ever raised there, more than Twinkle’s lunar hypotheses, or Savelle’s Christian economics, and which had never been settled. It was the one common topic among them. Other subjects owed their existence and prosperity to the protection and loyalty of one man, but little Norvel, having put his afoot, retired into silence and cigar smoke, and left its life to the care of others. He had injected the conundrum into a conversation of Twinkle Sampson’s about the inhabitants of Mars, in whose existence Twinkle Sampson not only believed, but took a far deeper interest than in those of his fellow earthmen.

“If,” little Norvel began, “if Mars is inhabited by a race so similar to ourselves—if—”

“Well, well, Mr. Norvel,” Twinkle Sampson interrupted, “that is fairly well conceded, I think. If—what?”

“If,” continued little Norvel tranquilly, “if it is so, what means of communication between us is there that is so unmistakably of _human origin_ that a sight of it, or a sound from it, would immediately convince them of our relationship?”

It had seemed, when the quiet little man first spoke, as if it was a question easily brushed aside; but a little discussion, genuine Ishamic, soon proved it to have greater weight. Norvel sat aside, contributing nothing then or ever thereafter. Indeed, the only result the question had, or seemed to have, for him was the winning by it of the deep affection of Twinkle Sampson.

The early discussion of the matter eliminated all possibilities of the sense of hearing. That one of the five senses had to be discarded from the possibilities of communication. There is no sound which humanity can create which nature, in some other form, cannot perfectly imitate. Except laughter? That suggestion was Savelle’s. But it was not successful, though he defended himself with his own peculiar fervor. It appealed to the intense emotionalism of the man, that idea of the ultimate expression of humanity being laughter. He took up its defense as recklessly as his school of economics, and with something of the same breadth of vision and indefinite reasoning. Laughter was, he claimed, beyond the narrow limits of the question discussed, that very thing, the ultimate expression of humanity. Man was distinctively not, as he has been defined, the unfeathered biped, not the tool-using animal; he was the animal who laughs, and in proof he instanced the great poet. When he wished to imbue men with his own immense pessimism that the wrath of the Zeus was not the mysterious working of nature but the malignity of men, he made that terrible phrase, the most terrible ever spoken, “The laughter of the gods.”

“Think of it yourselves,” he demanded. “Put it into your own words. The laughter of God!” He was standing up then in the heat of his pleading. “What that’s divine is left then? He can only be a man, a fearful superman.”

But they beat down the orator with instances of gurgling brooks and hyenas. He strove Homerically with his attackers, thundering his defense of his vision until old Isham had to come up to the table and look at them all with his faded blue eyes and precocious face of seventy years. But though he failed of conviction his argument did just what he said; it put the question outside the “narrow limits” Norvel had laid it in. Savelle always did that with every question. After he had spoken the phrase they all remembered was his—the ultimate expression of humanity. It was by such phrases, such ideas, Isham’s lived, as a place to which talk-hungry people learned to go.

Old Sampson, who always listened to Savelle, though he deplored his tendency “to wander in his talk,” away from the moon and kindred subjects, took a new lease of life from that night. At last a day had come when people really liked to talk about the moon, or Mars, which was almost as good. He became a mental manufacturer of objects of origin so exclusively human that once they were conveyed to Mars, once that difficulty overcome, would produce instant understanding. Almost nightly he would turn up with a new one, and invariably some one would overthrow his hopes by suggesting a _natural_, in distinction to his _human_, phenomenon. He would always feebly defend his invention, and then fall silent—apparently intent upon a new one.

It was Philbin, the novelist, whose hobby was “Weltpolitik,” and who revelled in prophecies those days of a European cataclysm, who put him, as it were, finally out of this particular misery.

“It seems to me,” complained Twinkle, in his plaintive voice, blinking almost tearfully at the table-cloth, “as if nature imitates everything.”

“Twinkle,” said Philbin, who was sitting next to him, “lend me your ears. I want ‘to whisper into their furry depths.’ Have you ever thought of going yourself?”

Twinkle, lifting his eyes to the other’s face, blinked and shook his head.

Savelle was the only man who did not laugh. He never laughed either at Sampson or Philbin. “Don’t you see,” he cried sharply, in his eager idea-driven way, “don’t you see what the man has discovered? Your ears will need cropping soon. ‘_Nature imitates everything!_’ That is, he has found, he has perceived, he is establishing by his own experiments that man, after all his effort and his boasting, after all his science and learning, which has made a joke of the teaching of Jesus and the poetry of Milton, that this _creature_ itself has in turn _created_ nothing. That man, after all, has only, can only, imitate nature.”

He let fall his fist on the table, looking around at his listeners. He always had listeners at Isham’s, and perhaps nowhere else in New York. For the moment he had forgotten his tiff with Philbin, had forgotten Philbin himself, and was all for rushing ahead on his idea-driven course to some unimaginable distance. But Philbin’s vanity never forgot slights. It was not the words—he gave and took sharper every day of his life—but the manner in which he was thrown aside as an unnoticeable obstruction in the other’s path of thought, the rush past him of the faster mind that mortified him. He knew Savelle, knew him better than any one in the room did, for that was his business, and he knew how fast he was going and how sharp he would fall, and then, like a mischievous little boy, with his foot, he stuck out his tongue and tripped him.

“That’s contrary to every teaching of Christ you ever raved about,” he said quickly.

Savelle did come down with rather a crash. Even his defenders admitted that much. But then he had been going very fast. Moreover, he was a man who habitually used too many words. He used too many to Philbin—a great deal too many. Philbin’s faults were almost all on the outside, and even through the casual communion of Isham’s he had made them pretty plain to every man there. He was vain, slightly arrogant, over-given to sneering. Savelle, in his defense of his position, managed to comment briefly upon each quality, and he put into the personalities the same vigor that he used to defend his theory of the universe. At the very best he showed a lamentable lack of proportion. At the worst he was vulgarly offensive.

That is the danger of such talk as men plunged into at Isham’s; it lacks proportion. Personalities and universalities get all mixed up, and sometimes it takes long patience and a good deal of humor to straighten out the tangle. Philbin and Savelle were in just such a tangle over little Norvel’s query. And neither of them had patience and Savelle had no grain of humor. If he had, he could not have come down from a discussion of his theory of the universe to criticism of Philbin’s personality. The matter was quite hopeless. The tangle only grew tighter until there was only one way of ending it. Philbin took it. He was a little man, and very nervous, and when he stood up his finger-tips just touched the table, and he was trembling so they played a tattoo on the table-cloth. Then he bowed and went out.

He had behaved the better of the two, but every one was glad to see him go—except old Sampson, to whom anything like ill-feeling gave genuine pain. He liked a placid world in which one could babble in amity about the moon. But to the rest Philbin was a bore. His Weltpolitik was uninteresting. His European cataclysm was a tale told by an idiot, full enough of learning, but signifying little or nothing. One could imagine baseball games on Mars, and make the matter realistic; but Philbin’s imaginings dealt in palpable absurdities. Even at Isham’s talk had limitations. Philbin had been a war correspondent in the Balkans, and they thought it had upset his mind.

Savelle affected to ignore his going away, and went on with his expounding of Twinkle Sampson’s discovery—so he was pleased to call it. He ridiculed Philbin’s criticism more fiercely than before. He, Sampson, had given a marvellously stimulating example, Savelle said, of what religious thought meant, that it was not in man to create, only in God. All that was human was imitation, even as man himself was God’s image. In truth, Philbin’s attack had stimulated him, and he talked that night better than he had ever talked. He felt that he had come off a second best in the encounter, and he determined to wipe out the remembrance from the memory of his hearers. Poor old Twinkle, hearing himself eulogized for the first time in his life, probably, sat in silence, winking almost tearfully, too amazed to be pleased.

And always after he made a point of emphasizing this theory of his—or of Sampson’s—as he called it. It became the rival in this talk of Christian economics. He did so without argument, for Philbin did not come back. A Futurist painter, who had found out Isham’s purely by accident, gradually took his place. At Isham’s places were always taken gradually. To make up for it they were generally taken for a very long time. Philbin’s was the first defection, in fact, since Twinkle’s low-toned monologues about the moon, with old Isham for the only listener, in the corner by the fireplace, had started it all eleven years ago. Philbin, too, had never been in very good standing; his trick of sarcasm hurt too many sensibilities. And then he was agnostic in everything, and Isham’s collectively believed in almost everything. Every man of them, except the Futurist painter who took his place and had scarcely known him, had some little hurt somewhere to remember him by, and so, of course, wanted to forget him.

They had almost succeeded, too, when suddenly that happened which brought his name up in all thoughts, the war. That night, the night when all rumors and surmises were solidified into the single, soul-stunning fact, nobody mentioned his name, though each knew the others were thinking of it. It seemed uncivil when they had each heard the rest make such fun of his theories. But after a few days some bolder soul broke the spell.

“Philbin—do you remember, he always prophesied it?”

But that was all, and Savelle sat silent even then.

In truth, the war changed Isham’s. Of course, it changed somehow almost everything in the world, but it changed Isham’s peculiarly. Before it had been a place where people went to talk of curious things, and now the same people went there—Sampson and Savelle and little Norvel and the Futurist painter, and old Isham himself was unchanged, nothing could alter him, and they still talked of curious things, more curious things than they had ever imagined before, but Isham’s had changed by ceasing to be different, because everywhere people were talking of the same things. Talk at Isham’s was just like talk on any street corner. In fact, the world had caught up with Isham’s.

Then one night Philbin did come back. It was in the second year of the great war, and it had been nearly five since he had gone away after his tiff with Savelle. He did not come directly into the back room, as he had been used to do, but dined by himself at a small table in front. He sat there a long time after dinner over his coffee, with his back turned to his old place. Every one of them had seen him and recognized him, and talk that night was slow. Though he had spoken to none of them and turned his back to them, each knew somehow that he would speak and that he had come there especially to speak, and that he would say something important, and they sat nervously waiting.

At last he did come, pushing back his chair and walking slowly up the room. They noticed then how he had changed. He had grown very much older. He had been scarcely fifty when he had left, and now he looked and walked like an old man, and his dress, which had always been very neat and careful, showed an old man’s carelessness. They all got up when he came and greeted him by name and with genuine cordiality. The little stings of five years since had vanished long ago. Savelle got up last and a little doubtfully, but it was Savelle he especially picked out.

“Ah, Savelle,” and he put out his hand.

Then he sat down in his old place and ordered more coffee and talked for a while quietly to his right-hand neighbor, who was little Norvel. He said nothing of himself and very little of any subject, seeming distrait and very depressed. After a little, abruptly he took the conversation in his own hands.

“Gentlemen,” he said, leaning forward with his hands folded on the cloth in front of him, “since I was here last I have had a very great sorrow. I have lost my son.”

Then he fell silent again, and apparently not hearing any of the things that were said to him.

“He was killed,” he began a second time, just as he had begun the first, “in Flanders, six weeks ago. He was twenty-two years and four months old. Before he died they pinned this on him.” He fumbled in his waistcoat, and picking out something threw it across the cloth over in front of Savelle. It was a little bronze cross known the world over, with two words on it, “For valor”. “I sent them my son and they sent me back that,” said Philbin.

It was the old Philbin voice—the same that had in turn galled each one of them.

“He went out in the night,” he went on, “and pulled back to life two London fishmongers. Then he died—going back for a third fishmonger. There is some six inches in a London newspaper telling about it. That same paper gave a column and a half last week to a story I wrote. And they gave six inches to my son. That’s queer, too, isn’t it?”

Nobody answered him. They were all afraid to—his tone was too bitter. No one was quite sure what he would say.

“We used to talk here years ago,” he went on presently, “about curious things. I think this curious enough to talk about. They gave a ‘stick’ to the death of my son and a column to the birth of my book. Savelle, you are a newspaper man, tell us about it?”

Savelle was looking at him with his eyes blazing, and he answered not a word.

“I suppose it’s logical,” said Philbin. “Any man may have a son. But I have written twenty books and had only one son.”

The only answer came from quite an unexpected quarter. It was little Norvel, who was sitting at Philbin’s elbow.

“Did you say, sir,” he asked, “that he went back three times?”

“Yes, Mr. Norvel, three times—three fishmongers.”

The man’s sneers would have been disgusting if they had not been so plainly aimed at himself first. As it was, they were almost terrible.

“Whether the three fishmongers lived or died,” he went on, “I don’t know. The six inches neglected to state. Want of space, possibly. You are a newspaper man, Savelle, perhaps you can explain.”

“I wish you would explain this, Mr. Savelle,” said little Norvel.

“What?” said Savelle.

“What part of nature Mr. Philbin was imitating when he went back?”

All the pent-up intensity of Savelle’s being rushed out in his answer: “I am maliciously misrepresented. There is no human element in such action. It is the divine phenomenon of Calvary.”

“Savelle,” put in Philbin, “when my son was alive he was a man. I believe, too, he died like a man. I prefer that to an imitation of anything—even God.”

The width of the table was between the two men, and the whole meaning of the universe. Their antagonism was irreconcilable. In that instant it had recovered all its bitterness of five years before. Time could do nothing. Not even chance could. It was literally immutable, the only thing in the world neither of those great forces can effect.

But the only pitiful part of it was, Sampson sitting between them, turning now to one, now to the other, with dim sight and faulty hearing, and wanting of either merely something human.

DE VILMARTE’S LUCK

_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.