Part 28

Hazelton’s position was that of the parent in the old-fashioned fairy tale who had two children, one beautiful and dark-haired, whom he despised and ill-treated and made work that the child of light might thrive. That, in his good-tempered moments, was how he explained the matter to his friends.

Dumont explained to Hazelton that he had two personalities and that he had no cause to be ashamed of this second and subjective one, even though he had discovered it by chance and in a moment of mockery.

“You have an artistic integrity that is proof even against yourself,” was his analysis.

The insistence of the public and of Dumont, in whose critical judgment he had believed, gave him something like respect for his foster-child. His belief in his judgment was subtly undermined.

“I shall leave you,” he told Dumont. “I shall secrete myself in the country undefiled by the artist’s paintbrush and there I will paint a _chef d’œuvre_ entitled ‘Le Mal du Ventre.’ On its proceeds I will return to my blond.”

While engaged on this work, which later became Hazelton’s most successful picture, Hazelton met Raoul de Vilmarte. This young man was a poor painter, but a delightful companion, and he endeared himself to Hazelton at once by his naïve enthusiasm for Hazelton’s former pictures.

“What grace they had—what beauty—what light! What an extraordinary irony that you should throw away a gift that I should so have cherished!” he exclaimed.

His words were to Hazelton like rain to a dying plant. He stopped work on “Le Mal du Ventre,” and began to paint to “suit himself” again. He had a childish delight in surprising De Vilmarte with his new picture.

“Why, why,” cried his new friend, “do you permit yourself to bury this supreme talent? No one has painted sunlight as well! Compared with this, darkness enshrouds the canvases of all other masters! Why do you not claim your position as the apostle of light?”

Hazelton explained that critics and the public had forced these canvases into obscurity.

“Another name signed to them—a Frenchman preferably—and we might hear a different story,” he added.

A sudden idea came to De Vilmarte. “Listen!” he said. “I have exposed nothing for two years. Indeed, I have been doubtful as to whether I should expose again. I know well enough that were my family unknown and were not certain members of the jury my masters, and others friends of my family, I might never have been accepted at all—it has been a sensitive point with me. Unfortunately, my mother and my friends believe me to be a genius—”

“Well?” said Hazelton, seeing some plan moving darkly through De Vilmarte’s talk.

“Well,” said De Vilmarte, slowly, “we might play a joke upon the critics of France. There is a gap between this and my work—immeasurable—one I could never bridge—and yet it is plausible—” He glanced from a sketch of his he was carrying to Hazelton’s picture.

Hazelton looked from one to the other. Compared, a gulf was there, fixed, unbridgable, and yet— He twisted his small, nervous hands together. Malice sparkled from his eyes.

“It _is_ plausible!” he agreed. He held out his hand. A sparkle of his malice gleamed in De Vilmarte’s pale eyes. They said no more. They shook hands. Later it seemed to Hazelton the ultimate irony that they should have entered into their sinister alliance with levity.

The second phase of the joke seemed as little menacing. You can imagine the three of them outside the Rotonde, Hazelton and De Vilmarte listening to Dumont’s praise of De Vilmarte’s picture. You can enter into the feelings of cynicism, of disillusion, that filled the hearts of the two _farceurs_. De Vilmarte’s picture had been accepted, hung well, then medaled. The critics had acclaimed him!

They sat there delicately baiting Dumont, bound together by the knowledge that they had against the world—for they, and they alone, knew the stuff of which fame is made. They were in the position of the pessimist who has proof of his pessimism. No one really believes the world as bad as he pretends, and here De Vilmarte and Hazelton had proof of their most ignoble suspicions; here was the corroding knowledge that Raoul’s position and popularity could achieve the recognition denied to an unknown man. He was French, and on the inside, and Hazelton was a foreigner and on the outside.

“Well,” said Raoul, when Dumont had left them, “we have a fine _gaffe_ to spring on them, _hein_? It’s going to cost me something. My mother is charmed—she will take it rather badly, I am afraid.”

“Well, why should she take it?” asked Hazelton, after a pause. “Why should we share our joke with all the world?”

“You mean?” asked Raoul.

It was then that the voice of fate spoke through Hazelton.

“You can have the picture,” he said, jerking his big head impatiently.

“Do you mean that I can have it—to keep?”

“Have it if you like. Money and what money buys is all I want from now on,” said Hazelton, and he shook his shoulders grossly and sensually while his nervous hands, the hands whose work the picture was, twisted themselves as though in agonized protest.

Hazelton went back to his studio and stood before his blond pictures, the children of his heart. It was already evening, but they shone out in the dim light. He was a little tipsy.

“So,” he said to them—“so all these years you have deceived me, as many a man has been deceived before by his beloved. Your flaunting smiles made me think you were what you are not. Dumont was right—my foster-child is better than you, for she made her way alone and without favor. I tried to think I had painted the impossible. Light is beyond me. Why should I think I could paint light? I am a child of darkness and misfortune. I know who my beloved is. You shall no longer work to support your sister!”

“What are you doing?” came his wife’s querulous voice. “Talking and mumbling to yourself before your pictures in the dark? Are you drunk again?”

――――

Some months passed before De Vilmarte and Hazelton met again. They ran into each other on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnasse.

“Hey! What are you doing so far from home?” cried Hazelton.

“Looking for you.”

“I was going to you,” Hazelton acknowledged.

They stared at each other scrutinizingly, each measuring the other with dawning distrust. Each waited.

“Let us go to the Rotonde,” Hazelton suggested.

They talked of other things, each waiting for the other to begin. Hazelton had the most resistance; he had flipped a penny as to whether he should go to seek De Vilmarte, but De Vilmarte had made his decision with anguish. It was he who finally said:

“You know—about the matter of the picture—my mother is quite frantic about my success. She is failing—”

“_Toc!_” cried Hazelton. “My poor wife has to go to the hospital.”

“Nothing to do, I know,” said De Vilmarte, looking away diffidently, “but for one’s mother—”

“But for one’s wife,” Hazelton capped him, genially. “An aged mother and a sick wife, and a joke on the world shared between two friends— What will a man not do for his sick wife and for his aged mother!”

A little shiver of cold disgust ran over Raoul. For the first time he felt a vague antipathy for Hazelton, his neck was so short and he rolled his big head in such a preposterous fashion.

They said good-by, Hazelton’s swagger, De Vilmarte’s averted eyes betraying their guilty knowledge that they had bought and sold things that should not be for sale.

Just how it came to be a settled affair neither De Vilmarte nor Hazelton could have told. Now an exhibition occurred for which De Vilmarte needed a picture; now Hazelton dogged by his need of money would come to him. Hazelton’s wife was always ailing. Her beauty and her disposition had been undermined by ill-health and self-indulgence, and he was one of those men temperamentally in debt and always on the edge of being sued or dispossessed.

But in Hazelton’s brain a fantastic and mad sense of rivalry grew. He had transferred his affection to his darker mood. Every notice of De Vilmarte’s name rankled in his mind. De Vilmarte’s growing vogue infuriated him. He felt that he must wring from the critics and the public the recognition that was his due so that this child of his, born of his irony and his despair, and that had been so faithful to him in spite of abuse, might be crowned. Just what had happened to both of them they realized after the opening of the _Salon_ next year.

“Take care,” Hazelton had warned De Vilmarte, “that they do not hang you better than they do me. That I will not have.” He had said it jokingly; but while De Vilmarte’s exhibit was massed, and he had won the second medal, Hazelton’s was scattered, and he had but one picture on the line; worse still, the critics gave Hazelton formal praise while they acclaimed De Vilmarte as the most promising of the younger school of landscape-painters.

De Vilmarte sought out Hazelton, full of a sense of apology. He found him gazing morosely into his glass of absinthe like one seeing unpleasant visions.

“It is really too strong,” Raoul said. “I am sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Hazelton replied, listlessly. “It’s got to stop, though!” He did not look up, but he felt the shock that traveled through De Vilmarte’s well-knit body. “It’s got to stop!” he repeated. “It’s too strong, as you say.”

There was a long silence, a silence full of gravity, full of despair, the silence of a man who has suddenly and unexpectedly heard his death sentence, a silence in whose duration De Vilmarte saw his life as it was. He had begun this as a joke, after his first agonized indecision, and now suddenly he saw not only his mother but himself involved, and the honor of his name. He waited for Hazelton to say something—anything, but Hazelton was chasing chimeras in the depths of his pale drink. As usual, his resistance was the greater. He sat hunched and red, his black hair framing his truculent face, unmindful of Raoul.

“It has gone beyond a joke,” was what Raoul finally said.

“That’s just it,” Hazelton agreed. “My God! Think how they have hung you—think how they have hung me. Where do I get off? Have I got to work for nothing all my life?”

“The recognition—you know what that means—it means nothing!” cried Raoul.

Hazelton did not answer.

“But I can’t—confess now!” Raoul’s anguish dragged it out of him. “I could afford to be a _farceur_—I cannot afford to be a cheat.”

Hazelton looked at him suddenly. Then he laughed. “Ha! ha! The little birds!” he said. “They stepped in the lime and they gummed up their little feet, didn’t they?” He lifted up his own small foot, which was well shod in American shoes. “Poor little bird! Poor little gummed feet!” He laughed immoderately.

Disgust and shame had their will with Raoul.

Hazelton was enchanted with his own similes, and, unmindful of his friend’s mood, he placed his small hand next Raoul’s, which was nervous and brown, the hand of a horseman.

“Can you see the handcuffs linking us?” he chuckled. “‘Linked for Life’ or ‘The Critics’ Revenge.’” He laughed again, but there was bitterness in his mirth. “We should have told before,” he muttered. “I suppose it is too late now. I cannot blame you or myself, but, by God! I’m not going to paint for you all my days. Why should I? We had better stop it, you know.” He drank deeply. “Courage, my boy!” he cried, setting down his glass. “I will have the courage to starve my wife if you will have the courage to disappoint your mother.”

They left it this way.

――――

When De Vilmarte again entered Hazelton’s studio, Hazelton barked at him ungraciously: “Ho! So you are back!”

“Yes,” said Raoul, “I am back.” He stood leaning upon his cane, very elegant, very correct, a hint of austerity about him that vanished charmingly under the sunshine of his smile.

Hazelton continued painting. “Well,” he said, without turning around, “you have not come, I suppose, for the pleasure of my company; but let me tell you in advance that I have no time to do any painting for you. I am not your _bonne à tout faire_.”

By Hazelton’s tone De Vilmarte realized that he was ready to capitulate; he wanted to be urged, and he desired to make it as disagreeable as he could because he was not in a position to send De Vilmarte to the devil any more than De Vilmarte could follow his instinct and leave Hazelton to come crawling to him—for there was always the chance that Hazelton might be lucky and would not come crawling.

“It’s your mother again, I suppose,” said Hazelton, ungraciously.

De Vilmarte grew white around his mouth; he grasped his cane until his hand was bloodless. “Some one unfortunately told her that they were urging me to have a private exhibition, and her heart is set upon it.”

“There are a number of things upon which my wife’s heart is set,” Hazelton admitted after a pause, during which he painted with delicate deliberation and exquisite surety while, fascinated and full of envy, De Vilmarte watched the delicate hand that seemed to have an independent existence of its own that seemed to be the utterance of some other and different personality than that which was expressed in Hazelton’s body. He turned around suddenly, grinning at De Vilmarte.

“How much are you going to pay for my soul this time?” he asked.

They had never bargained before. In the midst of it Hazelton stopped and looked De Vilmarte over from top to toe. No detail of his charm and of his correctness escaped him.

“How are you able to stand it?” he asked. “It must be hard on you, too.” The thought came to him as something new.

“Oh,” said Raoul, with awful sarcasm, “you think it is hard on me?”

“You must be fond of your mother,” said Hazelton. This time he had not meant to be brutal, and he was sorry to see De Vilmarte wince, but he did not know how to mend matters. “How are we going to break through?” he said. “What end is there for us? I do it for my wife, whom I don’t love, poor wretch, but for whom I feel damned responsible; and you sell your soul to please your mother. And do you get nothing for yourself, I wonder—” He half closed his little eyes, which glinted like jewels between his black lashes. “Appreciation and applause must be pleasant. One can buy as much with stolen money as one can with money earned.... There is only one way out—it is for one of us to die, or for one of _them_. There is death in our little drama, _hein, mon vieux_?”

――――

It was the private exhibition that fixed De Vilmarte’s reputation as an artist. It also marked in his own mind the precariousness of his position. And now the matter was complicated for him because he fell in love with a young girl who cared for his talent as did his mother. She was one of those proud young daughters of France who had no interest in rich and idle young men. Each word of her praise was anguish to him. The praise of the _feuilletons_ he could stand better, because some way they seemed to have nothing to do with him. It was the price which he paid willingly for his mother’s happiness.

He cared so much that he had tried not to care for her, and again his mother intervened. It was in every way a suitable match, and his mother told him that she did not wish to die without a grandchild. “You have obligations to your art,” she said, “but your obligations to your race are above those.”

She was now very feeble. His wedding and his next _Salon_ picture filled her mind. She was haunted by the presentiment that she would not see the summer come to its close.

So Raoul would hurry from her room to Hazelton to see how the picture was coming on. Hazelton was painting as he had never painted before. It seemed, indeed, as if he had a double personality, and as if each one of these personalities was trying to outstrip the other. As happens sometimes to an artist, he had made a sudden leap ahead. No picture that he had painted had the depth or the beauty or the clear, flowing color of this one. But he lagged along. It was as though the beauty of the picture which De Vilmarte was to sign tortured him, and he did not wish to finish it. He would stand before it, lost in the contemplation of its excellences like a devotee, refusing to paint.

The picture Hazelton was painting for his own signature was dark and magnificent, but the picture which he was painting for De Vilmarte had a singular radiance. It was as though at last Hazelton had painted the impossible; light shone from that picture. Yet it was not finished. Days passed, and Hazelton had not brought the picture further toward completion.

One day when De Vilmarte came in he found Hazelton brooding before it. He had been drinking. Tears were in his eyes. “It is too beautiful—too beautiful! Light is more beautiful than darkness. The taste for the black, the menacing, is the decadent appreciation of a too sheltered world. I cannot finish this picture for another to sign.”

“No,” De Vilmarte soothed him, “of course not.”

“Oh, my beautiful!” cried Hazelton, addressing his picture. “I cannot finish you! Come, De Vilmarte, we will drink.”

De Vilmarte went with Hazelton. He watched over him as a mother over her child. He talked; he reasoned; he sat quiet, white-lipped, while Hazelton would speculate as to what De Vilmarte got out of it.

“You are, I think, like the victim of a drug,” he said, jeering at De Vilmarte, his brilliant eyes agleam. That was truer than Hazelton knew. He could not stop. His mother, his fiancée, his friends, the critics, his world, expected a picture from him. He visualized them sometimes pushing him on to some doom of whose exact nature he was ignorant. Again it was to him as though they dug a dark channel in which his life had to flow.

Meantime he had to nurse Hazelton’s sick spirit along. He would go with him as he drank, stand by him in his studio, urging him to paint. In this way they spent hideous days together.

Hazelton developed a passion for torture. He was tortured himself. Alcohol tortured him, his embittered nature tortured him. He loved to see De Vilmarte writhe. He was torn between his desire to finish the picture and the anguish which he felt at seeing it about to pass into another’s hands. There were days when its existence hung in the balance.

“You see this palette-knife,” he would tell De Vilmarte, “and this palette of dark paint? A twist, my friend, a little twist of the knife and a little splash, and where is this luminous radiance? Gone!” And he would watch De Vilmarte as he let his brush hover over the brilliant surface.

How it hurt Raoul he knew, because when he thought of destroying the picture it was as though a knife were twisted in his own heart.

One afternoon De Vilmarte nursed Hazelton from café to café, listening to his noble braggadocio.

“Remember,” Hazelton urged Raoul, “the wonderful Mongolian legend of the father and son who loved the same woman, and whom for their honor they threw over a cliff! That’s the idea—the cliff! You shall throw our love over the cliff—you shall destroy the picture yourself. Come back with me!” He was as though possessed. Full of apprehension, De Vilmarte followed him.

They stood before the picture. It shone out as though indeed light came from it. Hazelton put the palette into De Vilmarte’s hand.

“Now, my friend, go to it!” he cried. “Paint, De Vilmarte—paint in your own natural manner! A few strokes of the brush of the great master De Vilmarte, and color and light will vanish from it. Why not—why not? You suffer, too—your face is drawn. You think I do not know how you hate me. I don’t need to look at you to know that. We always hate those who have power over us. Paint—paint! If I can bear it, surely you can. _Paint naturally_, De Vilmarte! Paint into it your own meagerness and banality! Paint into my masterpiece the signature of your own defeat.”

The afternoon was ebbing. It seemed as though the room were full of silent people, all holding Raoul back—his world, the critics, his fiancée, his mother. Besides, he had no right to destroy this beautiful thing to save his honor.

“You are not yourself,” he said.

“Aha! I know what you think of me. Ha! De Vilmarte, but I am a master, a great painter. Paint, and betray yourself. Ha! _sale voyou_, you will not? You are waiting to steal from me my final beautiful expression. You stand there— How is it that you permit me to call the Vicomte de la Tour de Vilmarte names? Why do you not strike me?”

“Oh, call me what you like,” Raoul cried. “Only finish the picture. There is very little more to do.”

“I tell you what I shall call you,” Hazelton jeered at him. “I will call you nothing worse than Raoul—Ra-oul—Ra—o—u—l!” He meowed it like a tom-cat. “How can I be so vile when I paint like an angel, Ra—o—u—l ... Ra—o—u—l!”

Sweat stood on Raoul’s forehead. He stood quiet. The picture was finished.

“Sign, my little Raoul, sign!” cried Hazelton. And with murder in his heart, a bitter tide of dark and sluggish blood mounting, ever mounting, Raoul signed and then fled into the lovely spring evening.

“This is the end,” he thought. “There shall be no more of this. Not for any one—not for any one, can I be so defiled!” For he felt the mystic identity between himself and his mother—that he was flesh of her flesh, and that in some vicarious way she was being insulted through him.

But it was not the end. It was with horror that Raoul learned that the picture had been bought by the state, that he was to receive the Legion of Honor. His mother was wild with joy.

“Now,” she cried, embracing him—“now I can depart in peace.” She looked so fragile that it seemed as if indeed her spirit had lingered only for this joy. She looked at him narrowly. “But you have been working too hard—you look ill. A long rest is what you need.”

“A very long rest,” Raoul agreed. He left the house, and, as if it was a magnet, the great exhibition drew him to it, and in front of his picture stood the thick, familiar figure of Hazelton, his nose jutting out truculently from his face, which was red and black like a poster. He broke through his attitude of devoted contemplation to turn upon Raoul.

“Bought by the state!” he cried. “To be hung in the Luxembourg!” He pointed menacingly with his cane at De Vilmarte’s neat little signature. “Why, I ask, should I go to my grave unknown, poor, a pensioner of your bounty? Why should you be happy—fêted?”

The irony of being accused of happiness was too much for De Vilmarte. He laughed aloud.