W De Vilmarte's Luck BY MARY HEATON VORSE HAT 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 almostalmost, 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." 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 illtreated and made work that the child of light might thrive. That, in his goodtempered 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 paint-brush 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. 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!" "What grace they had-what beauty A sardonic malice sparkled on Hazel--what light! What an extraordinary ton'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 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 "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. Un fortunately, 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?” |