The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 54

"I call it a picture," Dumont a.s.serted, 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 a.n.a.lysis.

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'uvre_ ent.i.tled '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 nave 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 ign.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed before De Vilmarte and Hazelton met again. They ran into each other on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparna.s.se.

"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 s.h.i.+ver 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 fas.h.i.+on.

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.