The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  Mrs. Birkton shrank back, trembling at his unwonted tone. She was afraid that he was going to be really ill, and her one thought was to withdraw without increasing his agitation.

  “Very well, dear—just as you please,” she said, deprecatingly. “It was foolish of me to trouble you. Don’t think of it again, but go to bed and try to sleep. I ought not to have disturbed you.”

  And she slipped back into the passageway, stealthily closing the door.

  Maurice had no thought of going to bed. He sank into his armchair, which he had pushed close to the gas stove, and sat staring at the hard yellow brilliance of the polished radiator.

  Helfenridge had gone to see Annette confirmed, but he had not been willing to come to supper; and Maurice knew him too well not to penetrate the shallow excuse which had satisfied Mrs. Birkton. Well, Helfenridge was right; no man can handle pitch without being defiled. And once a man’s hand is soiled, why should his friends care to touch it?

  After all, no cheap condonation of Helfenridge’s would have helped Maurice now; rather did he feel a tonic force in his friend’s disapproval. It showed Helfenridge to be the better and stronger man; and there was a kind of dispassionate consolation in that. If one had to fail it was better that the other should hold fast than be dragged down with him; and Helfenridge had always been the firmer footed of the two.

  So Maurice mused, letting the desolate hours travel on unregarded; till suddenly his vigil was disturbed by a knock, sharp and resolute this time, which made him start to his feet.

  “Helfenridge!” he exclaimed, and there on the threshold stood his friend.

  Maurice, on seeing him enter, had felt an involuntary thrill of relief, as though he were regaining his moral footing, but the illusion was transient and left him to sink back into profounder depths of self-accusal.

  “I thought you weren’t coming. You would have been quite right not to come,” he said, without asking his friend to sit down.

  “I didn’t mean to come,” Helfenridge answered, taking off his coat. “Your mother asked me to supper, but I refused. I couldn’t see my way clear at first—even in church that little white seraph didn’t seem to justify it for a moment; but I have been thinking hard all day—and now I’ve come.”

  He held out his hand, but Maurice made no motion to take it.

  “It’s no use,” he said, heavily. “No amount of thinking will make it right. What’s that in the Bible about doing evil that good may come? That’s what I’ve done. I’ve done evil that good might come—but it hasn’t come—it can’t. The fellow in the Bible was right. You think Annette’s dress was white? I tell you it was black—black as pitch.”

  “No, no,” said Helfenridge taking the chair which Maurice had not offered him. “The whole business is horribly mixed up, like most human affairs, but there’s a germ of right in it somewhere, and the best thing we can do now is to nurse that and get it to flower.”

  “To flower?—bah—a poison ivy—”

  “Some poisons are valuable medicines,” said Helfenridge.

  “Oh, stop—drop that inane metaphor. I tell you there’s no excuse for what I did, and what’s worse there’s no reparation. I’d give myself up, I’d go and proclaim the whole thing—but what good would that do? Smother everybody in mud—Annette, and my mother, and that poor woman! Helfenridge—”

  “Well?”

  “That woman—Mrs. Tolquitt—was in church with her little girl, who was confirmed. Think of it, will you! Her little girl was confirmed with Annette! And they sat next to us—only a few seats off. Helfenridge, I never knew she had a little girl.”

  “I don’t suppose we any of us know much about anybody else,” said Helfenridge.

  “And there she sat crying—crying, I tell you. Just such tears as my mother’s—glad and proud and sorry all at once!”

  “Yes, I saw her.”

  “You saw her—and you’re here now?”

  “I’m here, Maurice, because I know what you’re suffering.”

  They were both silent, Helfenridge seated with bowed head, Birkton stirring uneasily about the room with the thwarted movements of a caged animal.

  At length he flung himself down in the chair in front of his desk and hid his face against his arms. Helfenridge heard his sobs.

  It seemed a long time before either of them spoke; but finally Helfenridge rose and touched his friend’s shoulder.

  “My eyes are clearer than yours just now,” he said, “and I shouldn’t be here if I didn’t see a way out of it.”

  “A way out of it?”

  “Yes, only it’s no empirical remedy: geschehen ist geschehen. But you spoke just now of the biblical axiom that good can’t come out of evil; well, no generalization of that sort is final. It seems to me, on the contrary, that this good can come out of evil; that having done evil once it may become impossible to do it again. One ill act may become the strongest rampart one can build against further ill-doing. It divides things, it classifies them. It may be the means of lifting one forever out of the region of quibbles and compromises and moral subtleties, in which we who are curious in emotions are apt to loiter till we get a shaking up of some sort. It’s horrible to make a steppingstone out of a poor woman’s anguish and humiliation; but the anguish and humiliation can’t be prevented now; and who knows? In the occult economy of things they may be of some use to her if they help somebody else.”

  Maurice flung off his hand with a passionate gesture. “Quibbles and compromises and moral subtleties! What else is your reasoning made up of, I should like to know? It’s nothing but the basest Liguorianism. The plain fact is that I’m a dammed blackguard, not fit to look decent people in the face again.”

  His head sank once more upon his outstretched arms, and Helfenridge drew back.

  “Shall I go then, Maurice?”

  “Yes, go; it’s worse when you’re here.”

  Helfenridge for a few moments stood irresolute, as if waiting for his friend to recall him; but Maurice still sat without moving, bowed beneath the immensity of his shame.

  “Well, I’m going,” Helfenridge reluctantly declared.

  Maurice made no reply; his shoulders still shook, although his grief had grown noiseless.

  “Remember, Maurice,” his friend conjured him, “that whatever you do your mother and sister mustn’t find out about this business. That’s your first duty now, to hide the whole thing from them.”

  Still there came no answer. Helfenridge turned to the door and slowly opened it, glancing back as he did so at Maurice’s downcast head; then he stepped out into the passageway. But as the door closed behind him a new impulse, uncontrollable in its suddenness, made him turn back abruptly and re-enter the room.

  “Look here, Maurice, listen to me,” he exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to tell you—but, hang it all, there’s no use in your taking it like this. Blason was waiting for Mrs. Tolquitt outside the church, and I saw them drive away together in her brougham, with the little girl between them.”

  THE PORTRAIT

  IT WAS at Mrs. Mellish’s, one Sunday afternoon last spring. We were talking over George Lillo’s portraits—a collection of them was being shown at Durand-Ruel’s—and a pretty woman had emphatically declared:

  “Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him!”

  There was a chorus of interrogations.

  “Oh, because—he makes people look so horrid; the way one looks on board ship, or early in the morning, or when one’s hair is out of curl and one knows it. I’d so much rather be done by Mr. Cumberton!”

  Little Cumberton, the fashionable purveyor of rose-water pastels, stroked his mustache to hide a conscious smile.

  “Lillo is a genius—that we must all admit,” he said indulgently, as though condoning a friend’s weakness; “but he has an unfortunate temperament. He has been denied the gift—so precious to an artist—of perceiving the ideal. He sees only the defects of his sitters; one might almost fancy that he takes a morbid pleasure in exagg
erating their weak points, in painting them on their worst days; but I honestly believe he can’t help himself. His peculiar limitations prevent his seeing anything but the most prosaic side of human nature—

  “A primrose by the river’s brim

  A yellow primrose is to him,

  And it is nothing more.”

  Cumberton looked round to surprise an order in the eye of the lady whose sentiments he had so deftly interpreted, but poetry always made her uncomfortable, and her nomadic attention had strayed to other topics. His glance was tripped up by Mrs. Mellish.

  “Limitations? But, my dear man, it’s because he hasn’t any limitations, because he doesn’t wear the portrait painter’s conventional blinders, that we’re all so afraid of being painted by him. It’s not because he sees only one aspect of his sitters, it’s because he selects the real, the typical one, as instinctively as a detective collars a pickpocket in a crowd. If there’s nothing to paint—no real person—he paints nothing; look at the sumptuous emptiness of his portrait of Mrs. Guy Awdrey”—(“Why,” the pretty woman perplexedly interjected, “that’s the only nice picture he ever did!”) “If there’s one positive trait in a negative whole he brings it out in spite of himself; if it isn’t a nice trait, so much the worse for the sitter; it isn’t Lillo’s fault: he’s no more to blame than a mirror. Your other painters do the surface—he does the depths; they paint the ripples on the pond, he drags the bottom. He makes flesh seem as fortuitous as clothes. When I look at his portraits of fine ladies in pearls and velvet I seem to see a little naked cowering wisp of a soul sitting beside the big splendid body, like a poor relation in the darkest corner of an opera box. But look at his pictures of really great people—how great they are! There’s plenty of ideal there. Take his Professor Clyde; how clearly the man’s history is written in those broad steady strokes of the brush: the hard work, the endless patience, the fearless imagination of the great savant! Or the picture of Mr. Domfrey—the man who has felt beauty without having the power to create it. The very brushwork expresses the difference between the two; the crowding of nervous tentative lines, the subtler gradations of color, somehow convey a suggestion of dilettantism. You feel what a delicate instrument the man is, how every sense has been tuned to the finest responsiveness.” Mrs. Mellish paused, blushing a little at the echo of her own eloquence. “My advice is, don’t let George Lillo paint you if you don’t want to be found out—or to find yourself out. That’s why I’ve never let him do me; I’m waiting for the day of judgment,” she ended with a laugh.

  Everyone but the pretty woman, whose eyes betrayed a quivering impatience to discuss clothes, had listened attentively to Mrs. Mellish. Lillo’s presence in New York—he had come over from Paris for the first time in twelve years, to arrange the exhibition of his pictures—gave to the analysis of his methods as personal a flavor as though one had been furtively dissecting his domestic relations. The analogy, indeed, is not unapt; for in Lillo’s curiously detached existence it is difficult to figure any closer tie than that which unites him to his pictures. In this light, Mrs. Mellish’s flushed harangue seemed not unfitted to the trivialities of the tea hour, and some one almost at once carried on the argument by saying: “But according to your theory—that the significance of his work depends on the significance of the sitter—his portrait of Vard ought to be a masterpiece; and it’s his biggest failure.”

  Alonzo Vard’s suicide—he killed himself, strangely enough, the day that Lillo’s pictures were first shown—had made his portrait the chief feature of the exhibition. It had been painted ten or twelve years earlier, when the terrible “Boss” was at the height of his power; and if ever man presented a type to stimulate such insight as Lillo’s, that man was Vard; yet the portrait was a failure. It was magnificently composed; the technique was dazzling; but the face had been—well, expurgated. It was Vard as Cumberton might have painted him—a common man trying to look at ease in a good coat. The picture had never before been exhibited, and there was a general outcry of disappointment. It wasn’t only the critics and the artists who grumbled. Even the big public, which had gaped and shuddered at Vard, reveling in his genial villainy, and enjoying in his death that succumbing to divine wrath which, as a spectacle, is next best to its successful defiance—even the public felt itself defrauded. What had the painter done with their hero? Where was the big sneering domineering face that figured so convincingly in political cartoons and patent medicine advertisements, on cigar boxes and electioneering posters? They had admired the man for looking his part so boldly; for showing the undisguised blackguard in every line of his coarse body and cruel face; the pseudo-gentleman of Lillo’s picture was a poor thing compared to the real Vard. It had been vaguely expected that the great boss’s portrait would have the zest of an incriminating document, the scandalous attraction of secret memoirs; and instead, it was as insipid as an obituary. It was as though the artist had been in league with his sitter, had pledged himself to oppose to the lust for post-mortem “revelations” an impassable blank wall of negation. The public was resentful, the critics were aggrieved. Even Mrs. Mellish had to lay down her arms.

  “Yes, the portrait of Vard is a failure,” she admitted, “and I’ve never known why. If he’d been an obscure elusive type of villain, one could understand Lillo’s missing the mark for once; but with that face from the pit—!”

  She turned at the announcement of a name which our discussion had drowned, and found herself shaking hands with Lillo.

  The pretty woman started and put her hands to her curls; Cumberton dropped a condescending eyelid (he never classed himself by recognizing degrees in the profession), and Mrs. Mellish, cheerfully aware that she had been overheard, said, as she made room for Lillo—

  “I wish you’d explain it.”

  Lillo smoothed his beard and waited for a cup of tea. Then, “Would there be any failures,” he said, “if one could explain them?”

  “Ah, in some cases I can imagine it’s impossible to seize the type—or to say why one has missed it. Some people are like daguerreotypes; in certain lights one can’t see them at all. But surely Vard was obvious enough. What I want to know is, what became of him? What did you do with him? How did you manage to shuffle him out of sight?”

  “It was much easier than you think. I simply missed an opportunity—”

  “That a sign painter would have seen!”

  “Very likely. In fighting shy of the obvious one may miss the significant—”

  “—And when I got back from Paris,” the pretty woman was heard to wail, “I found all the women here were wearing the very models I’d brought home with me!”

  Mrs. Mellish, as became a vigilant hostess, got up and shuffled her guests; and the question of Vard’s portrait was dropped.

  I left the house with Lillo; and on the way down Fifth Avenue, after one of his long silences, he suddenly asked:

  “Is that what is generally said of my picture of Vard? I don’t mean in the newspapers, but by the fellows who know?”

  I said it was.

  He drew a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “it’s good to know that when one tries to fail one can make such a complete success of it.”

  “Tries to fail?”

  “Well, no; that’s not quite it, either; I didn’t want to make a failure of Vard’s picture, but I did so deliberately, with my eyes open, all the same. It was what one might call a lucid failure.”

  “But why—?”

  “The why of it is rather complicated. I’ll tell you sometime—” He hesitated. “Come and dine with me at the club by and by, and I’ll tell you afterwards. It’s a nice morsel for a psychologist.”

  At dinner he said little; but I didn’t mind that. I had known him for years, and had always found something soothing and companionable in his long abstentions from speech. His silence was never unsocial; it was bland as a natural hush; one felt one’s self included in it, not left out. He stroked his beard and gazed absently at me; and when we had finis
hed our coffee and liqueurs we strolled down to his studio.

  At the studio—which was less draped, less posed, less consciously “artistic” than those of the smaller men—he handed me a cigar, and fell to smoking before the fire. When he began to talk it was of indifferent matters, and I had dismissed the hope of hearing more of Vard’s portrait, when my eye lit on a photograph of the picture. I walked across the room to look at it, and Lillo presently followed with a light.

  “It certainly is a complete disguise,” he muttered over my shoulder; then he turned away and stooped to a big portfolio propped against the wall.

  “Did you ever know Miss Vard?” he asked, with his head in the portfolio; and without waiting for my answer he handed me a crayon sketch of a girl’s profile.

  I had never seen a crayon of Lillo’s, and I lost sight of the sitter’s personality in the interest aroused by this new aspect of the master’s complex genius. The few lines—faint, yet how decisive!—flowered out of the rough paper with the lightness of opening petals. It was a mere hint of a picture, but vivid as some word that wakens long reverberations in the memory.

  I felt Lillo at my shoulder again.

  “You knew her, I suppose?”

  I had to stop and think. Why, of course I’d known her: a silent handsome girl, showy yet ineffective, whom I had seen without seeing the winter that society had capitulated to Vard. Still looking at the crayon, I tried to trace some connection between the Miss Vard I recalled and the grave young seraph of Lillo’s sketch. Had the Vards bewitched him? By what masterstroke of suggestion had he been beguiled into drawing the terrible father as a barber’s block, the commonplace daughter as this memorable creature?

  “You don’t remember much about her? No, I suppose not. She was a quiet girl and nobody noticed her much, even when”—he paused with a smile—“you were all asking Vard to dine.”