Crucial Instances

by Edith Wharton

V

At the door he called a cab and put her in it; then, drawing out his watch again, he said abruptly: “I believe I’ll let you go alone. I’ll join you at the hotel in time for luncheon.” She wondered for a moment if he meant to return to the gallery; but, looking back as she drove off, she saw him walk rapidly away in the opposite direction.

The cabman had carried her half-way to the Hotel Cluny before she realized where she was going, and cried out to him to turn home. There was an acute irony in this mechanical prolongation of the quest of beauty. She had had enough of it, too much of it; her one longing was to escape, to hide herself away from its all-suffusing implacable light.

At the hotel, alone in her room, a few tears came to soften her seared vision; but her mood was too tense to be eased by weeping. Her whole being was centred in the longing to know what her husband thought. Their short exchange of words had, after all, told her nothing. She had guessed a faint resentment at her unexpected appearance; but that might merely imply a dawning sense, on his part, of being furtively watched and criticised. She had sometimes wondered if he was never conscious of her observation; there were moments when it seemed to radiate from her in visible waves. Perhaps, after all, he was aware of it, on his guard against it, as a lurking knife behind the thick curtain of his complacency; and to-day he must have caught the gleam of the blade.

Claudia had not reached the age when pity is the first chord to vibrate in contact with any revelation of failure. Her one hope had been that Keniston should be clear-eyed enough to face the truth. Whatever it turned out to be, she wanted him to measure himself with it. But as his image rose before her she felt a sudden half-maternal longing to thrust herself between him and disaster. Her eagerness to see him tested by circumstances seemed now like a cruel scientific curiosity. She saw in a flash of sympathy that he would need her most if he fell beneath his fate.

He did not, after all, return for luncheon; and when she came up-stairs from her solitary meal their salon was still untenanted. She permitted herself no sensational fears; for she could not, at the height of apprehension, figure Keniston as yielding to any tragic impulse; but the lengthening hours brought an uneasiness that was fuel to her pity. Suddenly she heard the clock strike five. It was the hour at which they had promised to meet Mrs. Davant at the gallery—the hour of the “ovation.” Claudia rose and went to the window, straining for a glimpse of her husband in the crowded street. Could it be that he had forgotten her, had gone to the gallery without her? Or had something happened—that veiled “something” which, for the last hour, had grimly hovered on the outskirts of her mind?

She heard a hand on the door and Keniston entered. As she turned to meet him her whole being was swept forward on a great wave of pity: she was so sure, now, that he must know.

But he confronted her with a glance of preoccupied brightness; her first impression was that she had never seen him so vividly, so expressively pleased. If he needed her, it was not to bind up his wounds.

He gave her a smile which was clearly the lingering reflection of some inner light. “I didn’t mean to be so late,” he said, tossing aside his hat and the little red volume that served as a clue to his explorations. “I turned in to the Louvre for a minute after I left you this morning, and the place fairly swallowed me up—I couldn’t get away from it. I’ve been there ever since.” He threw himself into a chair and glanced about for his pipe.

“It takes time,” he continued musingly, “to get at them, to make out what they’re saying—the big fellows, I mean. They’re not a communicative lot. At first I couldn’t make much out of their lingo—it was too different from mine! But gradually, by picking up a hint here and there, and piecing them together, I’ve begun to understand; and to-day, by Jove, I got one or two of the old chaps by the throat and fairly turned them inside out—made them deliver up their last drop.” He lifted a brilliant eye to her. “Lord, it was tremendous!” he declared.

He had found his pipe and was musingly filling it. Claudia waited in silence.

“At first,” he began again, “I was afraid their language was too hard for me—that I should never quite know what they were driving at; they seemed to cold-shoulder me, to be bent on shutting me out. But I was bound I wouldn’t be beaten, and now, to-day”—he paused a moment to strike a match—“when I went to look at those things of mine it all came over me in a flash. By Jove! it was as if I’d made them all into a big bonfire to light me on my road!”

His wife was trembling with a kind of sacred terror. She had been afraid to pray for light for him, and here he was joyfully casting his whole past upon the pyre!

“Is there nothing left?” she faltered.

“Nothing left? There’s everything!” he exulted. “Why, here I am, not much over forty, and I’ve found out already—already!” He stood up and began to move excitedly about the room. “My God! Suppose I’d never known! Suppose I’d gone on painting things like that forever! Why, I feel like those chaps at revivalist meetings when they get up and say they’re saved! Won’t somebody please start a hymn?”

Claudia, with a tremulous joy, was letting herself go on the strong current of his emotion; but it had not yet carried her beyond her depth, and suddenly she felt hard ground underfoot.

“Mrs. Davant—“ she exclaimed.

He stared, as though suddenly recalled from a long distance. “Mrs. Davant?”

“We were to have met her—this afternoon—now—“

“At the gallery? Oh, that’s all right. I put a stop to that; I went to see her after I left you; I explained it all to her.”

“All?”

“I told her I was going to begin all over again.”

Claudia’s heart gave a forward bound and then sank back hopelessly.

“But the panels—?”

“That’s all right too. I told her about the panels,” he reassured her.

“You told her—?”

“That I can’t paint them now. She doesn’t understand, of course; but she’s the best little woman and she trusts me.”

She could have wept for joy at his exquisite obtuseness. “But that isn’t all,” she wailed. “It doesn’t matter how much you’ve explained to her. It doesn’t do away with the fact that we’re living on those panels!”

“Living on them?”

“On the money that she paid you to paint them. Isn’t that what brought us here? And—if you mean to do as you say—to begin all over again—how in the world are we ever to pay her back?”

Her husband turned on her an inspired eye. “There’s only one way that I know of,” he imperturbably declared, “and that’s to stay out here till I learn how to paint them.”

“COPY”
A DIALOGUE

Mrs. Ambrose Dale—forty, slender, still young—sits in her drawing-room at the tea-table. The winter twilight is falling, a lamp has been lit, there is a fire on the hearth, and the room is pleasantly dim and flower-scented. Books are scattered everywhere—mostly with autograph inscriptions “From the Author”—and a large portrait of Mrs. Dale, at her desk, with papers strewn about her, takes up one of the wall-panels. Before Mrs. Dale stands Hilda, fair and twenty, her hands full of letters.

Mrs. Dale. Ten more applications for autographs? Isn’t it strange that people who’d blush to borrow twenty dollars don’t scruple to beg for an autograph?

Hilda (reproachfully). Oh—

Mrs. Dale. What’s the difference, pray?

Hilda. Only that your last autograph sold for fifty—

Mrs. Dale (not displeased). Ah?—I sent for you, Hilda, because I’m dining out to-night, and if there’s nothing important to attend to among these letters you needn’t sit up for me.

Hilda. You don’t mean to work?

Mrs. Dale. Perhaps; but I sha’n’t need you. You’ll see that my cigarettes and coffee-machine are in place, and that I don’t have to crawl about the floor in search of my pen-wiper? That’s all. Now about these letters—

Hilda (impulsively). Oh, Mrs. Dale—

Mrs. Dale. Well?

Hilda. I’d rather sit up for you.

Mrs. Dale. Child, I’ve nothing for you to do. I shall be blocking out the tenth chapter of Winged Purposes and it won’t be ready for you till next week.

Hilda. It isn’t that—but it’s so beautiful to sit here, watching and listening, all alone in the night, and to feel that you’re in there (she points to the study-door) creating—.(Impulsively.) What do I care for sleep?

Mrs. Dale (indulgently). Child—silly child!—Yes, I should have felt so at your age—it would have been an inspiration—

Hilda (rapt). It is!

Mrs. Dale. But you must go to bed; I must have you fresh in the morning; for you’re still at the age when one is fresh in the morning! (She sighs.) The letters? (Abruptly.) Do you take notes of what you feel, Hilda—here, all alone in the night, as you say?

Hilda (shyly). I have—

Mrs. Dale (smiling). For the diary?

Hilda (nods and blushes).

Mrs. Dale (caressingly). Goose!—Well, to business. What is there?

Hilda. Nothing important, except a letter from Stroud & Fayerweather to say that the question of the royalty on Pomegranate Seed has been settled in your favor. The English publishers of Immolation write to consult you about a six-shilling edition; Olafson, the Copenhagen publisher, applies for permission to bring out a Danish translation of The Idol’s Feet; and the editor of the Semaphore wants a new serial—I think that’s all; except that Woman’s Sphere and The Droplight ask for interviews—with photographs—

Mrs. Dale. The same old story! I’m so tired of it all. (To herself, in an undertone.) But how should I feel if it all stopped? (The servant brings in a card.)

Mrs. Dale (reading it). Is it possible? Paul Ventnor? (To the servant.) Show Mr. Ventnor up. (To herself.) Paul Ventnor!

Hilda (breathless). Oh, Mrs. Dale—the Mr. Ventnor?

Mrs. Dale (smiling). I fancy there’s only one.

Hilda. The great, great poet? (Irresolute.) No, I don’t dare—

Mrs. Dale (with a tinge of impatience). What?

Hilda (fervently). Ask you—if I might—oh, here in this corner, where he can’t possibly notice me—stay just a moment? Just to see him come in? To see the meeting between you—the greatest novelist and the greatest poet of the age? Oh, it’s too much to ask! It’s an historic moment.

Mrs. Dale. Why, I suppose it is. I hadn’t thought of it in that light. Well (smiling), for the diary—

Hilda. Oh, thank you, thank you! I’ll be off the very instant I’ve heard him speak.

Mrs. Dale. The very instant, mind. (She rises, looks at herself in the glass, smooths her hair, sits down again, and rattles the tea-caddy.) Isn’t the room very warm?—(She looks over at her portrait.) I’ve grown stouter since that was painted—. You’ll make a fortune out of that diary, Hilda—

Hilda (modestly). Four publishers have applied to me already—

The Servant (announces). Mr. Paul Ventnor.

(Tall, nearing fifty, with an incipient stoutness buttoned into a masterly frock-coat, Ventnor drops his glass and advances vaguely, with a short-sighted stare.)

Ventnor. Mrs. Dale?

Mrs. Dale. My dear friend! This is kind. (She looks over her shoulder at Hilda, who vanishes through the door to the left.) The papers announced your arrival, but I hardly hoped—

Ventnor (whose short-sighted stare is seen to conceal a deeper embarrassment). You hadn’t forgotten me, then?

Mrs. Dale. Delicious! Do you forget that you’re public property?

Ventnor. Forgotten, I mean, that we were old friends?

Mrs. Dale. Such old friends! May I remind you that it’s nearly twenty years since we’ve met? Or do you find cold reminiscences indigestible?

Ventnor. On the contrary, I’ve come to ask you for a dish of them—we’ll warm them up together. You’re my first visit.

Mrs. Dale. How perfect of you! So few men visit their women friends in chronological order; or at least they generally do it the other way round, beginning with the present day and working back—if there’s time—to prehistoric woman.

Ventnor. But when prehistoric woman has become historic woman—?

Mrs. Dale. Oh, it’s the reflection of my glory that has guided you here, then?

Ventnor. It’s a spirit in my feet that has led me, at the first opportunity, to the most delightful spot I know.

Mrs. Dale. Oh, the first opportunity—!

Ventnor. I might have seen you very often before; but never just in the right way.

Mrs. Dale. Is this the right way?

Ventnor. It depends on you to make it so.

Mrs. Dale. What a responsibility! What shall I do?

Ventnor. Talk to me—make me think you’re a little glad to see me; give me some tea and a cigarette; and say you’re out to everyone else.

Mrs. Dale. Is that all? (She hands him a cup of tea.) The cigarettes are at your elbow—. And do you think I shouldn’t have been glad to see you before?

Ventnor. No; I think I should have been too glad to see you.

Mrs. Dale. Dear me, what precautions! I hope you always wear goloshes when it looks like rain and never by any chance expose yourself to a draught. But I had an idea that poets courted the emotions—

Ventnor. Do novelists?

Mrs. Dale. If you ask me—on paper!

Ventnor. Just so; that’s safest. My best things about the sea have been written on shore. (He looks at her thoughtfully.) But it wouldn’t have suited us in the old days, would it?

Mrs. Dale (sighing). When we were real people!

Ventnor. Real people?

Mrs. Dale. Are you, now? I died years ago. What you see before you is a figment of the reporter’s brain—a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs, with ink in its veins. A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion.

Ventnor (sighing). Ah, well, yes—as you say, we’re public property.

Mrs. Dale. If one shared equally with the public! But the last shred of my identity is gone.

Ventnor. Most people would be glad to part with theirs on such terms. I have followed your work with immense interest. Immolation is a masterpiece. I read it last summer when it first came out.

Mrs. Dale (with a shade less warmth). Immolation has been out three years.

Ventnor. Oh, by Jove—no? Surely not—But one is so overwhelmed—one loses count. (Reproachfully.) Why have you never sent me your books?

Mrs. Dale. For that very reason.

Ventnor (deprecatingly). You know I didn’t mean it for you! And my first book—do you remember—was dedicated to you.

Mrs. Dale. Silver Trumpets—

Ventnor (much interested). Have you a copy still, by any chance? The first edition, I mean? Mine was stolen years ago. Do you think you could put your hand on it?

Mrs. Dale (taking a small shabby book from the table at her side). It’s here.

Ventnor (eagerly). May I have it? Ah, thanks. This is very interesting. The last copy sold in London for £40, and they tell me the next will fetch twice as much. It’s quite introuvable.

Mrs. Dale. I know that. (A pause. She takes the book from him, opens it, and reads, half to herself—)

How much we two have seen together,
Of other eyes unwist,
Dear as in days of leafless weather
The willow’s saffron mist,

Strange as the hour when Hesper swings
A-sea in beryl green,
While overhead on dalliant wings
The daylight hangs serene,

And thrilling as a meteor’s fall
Through depths of lonely sky,
When each to each two watchers call:
I saw it!—So did I.

Ventnor. Thin, thin—the troubadour tinkle. Odd how little promise there is in first volumes!

Mrs. Dale (with irresistible emphasis). I thought there was a distinct promise in this!

Ventnor (seeing his mistake). Ah—the one you would never let me fulfil? (Sentimentally.) How inexorable you were! You never dedicated a book to me.

Mrs. Dale. I hadn’t begun to write when we were—dedicating things to each other.

Ventnor. Not for the public—but you wrote for me; and, wonderful as you are, you’ve never written anything since that I care for half as much as—

Mrs. Dale (interested). Well?

Ventnor. Your letters.

Mrs. Dale (in a changed voice). My letters—do you remember them?

Ventnor. When I don’t, I reread them.

Mrs. Dale (incredulous). You have them still?

Ventnor (unguardedly). You haven’t mine, then?

Mrs. Dale (playfully). Oh, you were a celebrity already. Of course I kept them! (Smiling.) Think what they are worth now! I always keep them locked up in my safe over there. (She indicates a cabinet.)

Ventnor (after a pause). I always carry yours with me.

Mrs. Dale (laughing). You—

Ventnor. Wherever I go. (A longer pause. She looks at him fixedly.) I have them with me now.

Mrs. Dale (agitated). You—have them with you—now?

Ventnor (embarrassed). Why not? One never knows—

Mrs. Dale. Never knows—?

Ventnor (humorously). Gad—when the bank-examiner may come round. You forget I’m a married man.

Mrs. Dale. Ah—yes.

Ventnor (sits down beside her). I speak to you as I couldn’t to anyone else—without deserving a kicking. You know how it all came about. (A pause.) You’ll bear witness that it wasn’t till you denied me all hope—

Mrs. Dale (a little breathless). Yes, yes—

Ventnor. Till you sent me from you—

Mrs. Dale. It’s so easy to be heroic when one is young! One doesn’t realize how long life is going to last afterward. (Musing.) Nor what weary work it is gathering up the fragments.

Ventnor. But the time comes when one sends for the china-mender, and has the bits riveted together, and turns the cracked side to the wall—

Mrs. Dale. And denies that the article was ever damaged?

Ventnor. Eh? Well, the great thing, you see, is to keep one’s self out of reach of the housemaid’s brush. (A pause.) If you’re married you can’t—always. (Smiling.) Don’t you hate to be taken down and dusted?

Mrs. Dale (with intention). You forget how long ago my husband died. It’s fifteen years since I’ve been an object of interest to anybody but the public.

Ventnor (smiling). The only one of your admirers to whom you’ve ever given the least encouragement!

Mrs. Dale. Say rather the most easily pleased!

Ventnor. Or the only one you cared to please?

Mrs. Dale. Ah, you haven’t kept my letters!

Ventnor (gravely). Is that a challenge? Look here, then! (He drams a packet from his pocket and holds it out to her.)

Mrs. Dale (taking the packet and looking at him earnestly). Why have you brought me these?

Ventnor. I didn’t bring them; they came because I came—that’s all. (Tentatively.) Are we unwelcome?

Mrs. Dale (who has undone the packet and does not appear to hear him). The very first I ever wrote you—the day after we met at the concert. How on earth did you happen to keep it? (She glances over it.) How perfectly absurd! Well, it’s not a compromising document.

Ventnor. I’m afraid none of them are.

Mrs. Dale (quickly). Is it to that they owe their immunity? Because one could leave them about like safety matches?—Ah, here’s another I remember—I wrote that the day after we went skating together for the first time. (She reads it slowly.) How odd! How very odd!

Ventnor. What?

Mrs. Dale. Why, it’s the most curious thing—I had a letter of this kind to do the other day, in the novel I’m at work on now—the letter of a woman who is just—just beginning—

Ventnor. Yes—just beginning—?

Mrs. Dale. And, do you know, I find the best phrase in it, the phrase I somehow regarded as the fruit of—well, of all my subsequent discoveries—is simply plagiarized, word for word, from this!

Ventnor (eagerly). I told you so! You were all there!

Mrs. Dale (critically). But the rest of it’s poorly done—very poorly. (Reads the letter over.) H’m—I didn’t know how to leave off. It takes me forever to get out of the door.

Ventnor (gayly). Perhaps I was there to prevent you! (After a pause.) I wonder what I said in return?

Mrs. Dale (interested). Shall we look? (She rises.) Shall we—really? I have them all here, you know. (She goes toward the cabinet.)

Ventnor (following her with repressed eagerness). Oh—all!

Mrs. Dale (throws open the door of the cabinet, revealing a number of packets). Don’t you believe me now?

Ventnor. Good heavens! How I must have repeated myself! But then you were so very deaf.

Mrs. Dale (takes out a packet and returns to her seat. Ventnor extends an impatient hand for the letters). No—no; wait! I want to find your answer to the one I was just reading. (After a pause.) Here it is—yes, I thought so!

Ventnor. What did you think?

Mrs. Dale (triumphantly). I thought it was the one in which you quoted Epipsychidion—

Ventnor. Mercy! Did I quote things? I don’t wonder you were cruel.

Mrs. Dale. Ah, and here’s the other—the one I—the one I didn’t answer—for a long time. Do you remember?

Ventnor (with emotion). Do I remember? I wrote it the morning after we heard Isolde—

Mrs. Dale (disappointed). No—no. That wasn’t the one I didn’t answer! Here—this is the one I mean.

Ventnor (takes it curiously). Ah—h’m—this is very like unrolling a mummy—(he glances at her)—with a live grain of wheat in it, perhaps?—Oh, by Jove!

Mrs. Dale. What?

Ventnor. Why, this is the one I made a sonnet out of afterward! By Jove, I’d forgotten where that idea came from. You may know the lines perhaps? They’re in the fourth volume of my Complete Edition—It’s the thing beginning

Love came to me with unrelenting eyes—

one of my best, I rather fancy. Of course, here it’s very crudely put—the values aren’t brought out—ah! this touch is good though—very good. H’m, I daresay there might be other material. (He glances toward the cabinet.)

Mrs. Dale (drily). The live grain of wheat, as you said!

Ventnor. Ah, well—my first harvest was sown on rocky ground—now I plant for the fowls of the air. (Rising and walking toward the cabinet.) When can I come and carry off all this rubbish?

Mrs. Dale. Carry it off?

Ventnor (embarrassed). My dear lady, surely between you and me explicitness is a burden. You must see that these letters of ours can’t be left to take their chance like an ordinary correspondence—you said yourself we were public property.

Mrs. Dale. To take their chance? Do you suppose that, in my keeping, your letters take any chances? (Suddenly.) Do mine—in yours?

Ventnor (still more embarrassed). Helen—! (He takes a turn through the room.) You force me to remind you that you and I are differently situated—that in a moment of madness I sacrificed the only right you ever gave me—the right to love you better than any other woman in the world. (A pause. She says nothing and he continues, with increasing difficulty—) You asked me just now why I carried your letters about with me—kept them, literally, in my own hands. Well, suppose it’s to be sure of their not falling into some one else’s?

Mrs. Dale. Oh!

Ventnor (throws himself into a chair). For God’s sake don’t pity me!

Mrs. Dale (after a long pause). Am I dull—or are you trying to say that you want to give me back my letters?

Ventnor (starting up). I? Give you back—? God forbid! Your letters? Not for the world! The only thing I have left! But you can’t dream that in my hands—

Mrs. Dale (suddenly). You want yours, then?

Ventnor (repressing his eagerness). My dear friend, if I’d ever dreamed that you’d kept them—?

Mrs. Dale (accusingly). You do want them. (A pause. He makes a deprecatory gesture.) Why should they be less safe with me than mine with you? I never forfeited the right to keep them.

Ventnor (after another pause). It’s compensation enough, almost, to have you reproach me! (He moves nearer to her, but she makes no response.) You forget that I’ve forfeited all my rights—even that of letting you keep my letters.

Mrs. Dale. You do want them! (She rises, throws all the letters into the cabinet, locks the door and puts the key in her pocket.) There’s my answer.

Ventnor. Helen—!

Mrs. Dale. Ah, I paid dearly enough for the right to keep them, and I mean to! (She turns to him passionately.) Have you ever asked yourself how I paid for it? With what months and years of solitude, what indifference to flattery, what resistance to affection?—Oh, don’t smile because I said affection, and not love. Affection’s a warm cloak in cold weather; and I have been cold; and I shall keep on growing colder! Don’t talk to me about living in the hearts of my readers! We both know what kind of a domicile that is. Why, before long I shall become a classic! Bound in sets and kept on the top book-shelf—brr, doesn’t that sound freezing? I foresee the day when I shall be as lonely as an Etruscan museum! (She breaks into a laugh.) That’s what I’ve paid for the right to keep your letters. (She holds out her hand.) And now give me mine.

Ventnor. Yours?

Mrs. Dale (haughtily). Yes; I claim them.

Ventnor (in the same tone). On what ground?

Mrs. Dale. Hear the man!—Because I wrote them, of course.

Ventnor. But it seems to me that—under your inspiration, I admit—I also wrote mine.

Mrs. Dale. Oh, I don’t dispute their authenticity—it’s yours I deny!

Ventnor. Mine?

Mrs. Dale. You voluntarily ceased to be the man who wrote me those letters—you’ve admitted as much. You traded paper for flesh and blood. I don’t dispute your wisdom—only you must hold to your bargain! The letters are all mine.

Ventnor (groping between two tones). Your arguments are as convincing as ever. (He hazards a faint laugh.) You’re a marvellous dialectician—but, if we’re going to settle the matter in the spirit of an arbitration treaty, why, there are accepted conventions in such cases. It’s an odious way to put it, but since you won’t help me, one of them is—

Mrs. Dale. One of them is—?

Ventnor. That it is usual—that technically, I mean, the letter—belongs to its writer—

Mrs. Dale (after a pause). Such letters as these?

Ventnor. Such letters especially—

Mrs. Dale. But you couldn’t have written them if I hadn’t—been willing to read them. Surely there’s more of myself in them than of you.

Ventnor. Surely there’s nothing in which a man puts more of himself than in his love-letters!

Mrs. Dale (with emotion). But a woman’s love-letters are like her child. They belong to her more than to anybody else—

Ventnor. And a man’s?

Mrs. Dale (with sudden violence). Are all he risks!—There, take them. (She flings the key of the cabinet at his feet and sinks into a chair.)

Ventnor (starts as though to pick up the key; then approaches and bends over her). Helen—oh, Helen!

Mrs. Dale (she yields her hands to him, murmuring:) Paul! (Suddenly she straightens herself and draws back illuminated.) What a fool I am! I see it all now. You want them for your memoirs!

Ventnor (disconcerted). Helen—

Mrs. Dale (agitated). Come, come—the rule is to unmask when the signal’s given! You want them for your memoirs.

Ventnor (with a forced laugh). What makes you think so?

Mrs. Dale (triumphantly). Because I want them for mine!

Ventnor (in a changed tone). Ah—. (He moves away from her and leans against the mantelpiece. She remains seated, with her eyes fixed on him.)

Mrs. Dale. I wonder I didn’t see it sooner. Your reasons were lame enough.

Ventnor (ironically). Yours were masterly. You’re the more accomplished actor of the two. I was completely deceived.

Mrs. Dale. Oh, I’m a novelist. I can keep up that sort of thing for five hundred pages!

Ventnor. I congratulate you. (A pause.)

Mrs. Dale (moving to her seat behind the tea-table). I’ve never offered you any tea. (She bends over the kettle.) Why don’t you take your letters?

Ventnor. Because you’ve been clever enough to make it impossible for me. (He picks up the key and hands it to her. Then abruptly)—Was it all acting—just now?

Mrs. Dale. By what right do you ask?

Ventnor. By right of renouncing my claim to my letters. Keep them—and tell me.

Mrs. Dale. I give you back your claim—and I refuse to tell you.

Ventnor (sadly). Ah, Helen, if you deceived me, you deceived yourself also.

Mrs. Dale. What does it matter, now that we’re both undeceived? I played a losing game, that’s all.

Ventnor. Why losing—since all the letters are yours?

Mrs. Dale. The letters? (Slowly.) I’d forgotten the letters—

Ventnor (exultant). Ah, I knew you’d end by telling me the truth!

Mrs. Dale. The truth? Where is the truth? (Half to herself.) I thought I was lying when I began—but the lies turned into truth as I uttered them! (She looks at Ventnor.) I did want your letters for my memoirs—I did think I’d kept them for that purpose—and I wanted to get mine back for the same reason—but now (she puts out her hand and picks up some of her letters, which are lying scattered on the table near her)—how fresh they seem, and how they take me back to the time when we lived instead of writing about life!

Ventnor (smiling). The time when we didn’t prepare our impromptu effects beforehand and copyright our remarks about the weather!

Mrs. Dale. Or keep our epigrams in cold storage and our adjectives under lock and key!

Ventnor. When our emotions weren’t worth ten cents a word, and a signature wasn’t an autograph. Ah, Helen, after all, there’s nothing like the exhilaration of spending one’s capital!

Mrs. Dale. Of wasting it, you mean. (She points to the letters.) Do you suppose we could have written a word of these if we’d known we were putting our dreams out at interest? (She sits musing, with her eyes on the fire, and he watches her in silence.) Paul, do you remember the deserted garden we sometimes used to walk in?

Ventnor. The old garden with the high wall at the end of the village street? The garden with the ruined box-borders and the broken-down arbor? Why, I remember every weed in the paths and every patch of moss on the walls!

Mrs. Dale. Well—I went back there the other day. The village is immensely improved. There’s a new hotel with gas-fires, and a trolley in the main street; and the garden has been turned into a public park, where excursionists sit on cast-iron benches admiring the statue of an Abolitionist.

Ventnor. An Abolitionist—how appropriate!

Mrs. Dale. And the man who sold the garden has made a fortune that he doesn’t know how to spend—

Ventnor (rising impulsively). Helen, (he approaches and lays his hand on her letters), let’s sacrifice our fortune and keep the excursionists out!

Mrs. Dale (with a responsive movement). Paul, do you really mean it?

Ventnor (gayly). Mean it? Why, I feel like a landed proprietor already! It’s more than a garden—it’s a park.

Mrs. Dale. It’s more than a park, it’s a world—as long as we keep it to ourselves!

Ventnor. Ah, yes—even the pyramids look small when one sees a Cook’s tourist on top of them! (He takes the key from the table, unlocks the cabinet and brings out his letters, which he lays beside hers.) Shall we burn the key to our garden?

Mrs. Dale. Ah, then it will indeed be boundless! (Watching him while he throws the letters into the fire.)

Ventnor (turning back to her with a half-sad smile). But not too big for us to find each other in?

Mrs. Dale. Since we shall be the only people there! (He takes both her hands and they look at each other a moment in silence. Then he goes out by the door to the right. As he reaches the door she takes a step toward him, impulsively; then turning back she leans against the chimney-piece, quietly watching the letters burn.)

THE REMBRANDT

“You’re so artistic,” my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor’s exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me I’m so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather’s Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of Eleanor’s; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty cousin’s importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in Eleanor’s line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets: the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one’s own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor, that none of the ready-made virtues ever had fitted her: they all pinched somewhere, and she’d given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, “You’re so artistic.” emphasizing the conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely stipulated, “It’s not old Saxe again?”

She shook her head reassuringly. “A picture—a Rembrandt!”

“Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?”

“Well”—she smiled—“that, of course, depends on you.”

“On me?”

“On your attribution. I dare say Mrs. Fontage would consent to the change—though she’s very conservative.”

A gleam of hope came to me and I pronounced: “One can’t judge of a picture in this weather.”

“Of course not. I’m coming for you to-morrow.”

“I’ve an engagement to-morrow.”

“I’ll come before or after your engagement.”

The afternoon paper lay at my elbow and I contrived a furtive consultation of the weather-report. It said “Rain to-morrow,” and I answered briskly: “All right, then; come at ten”—rapidly calculating that the clouds on which I counted might lift by noon.

My ingenuity failed of its due reward; for the heavens, as if in league with my cousin, emptied themselves before morning, and punctually at ten Eleanor and the sun appeared together in my office.

I hardly listened, as we descended the Museum steps and got into Eleanor’s hansom, to her vivid summing-up of the case. I guessed beforehand that the lady we were about to visit had lapsed by the most distressful degrees from opulence to a “hall-bedroom”; that her grandfather, if he had not been Minister to France, had signed the Declaration of Independence; that the Rembrandt was an heirloom, sole remnant of disbanded treasures; that for years its possessor had been unwilling to part with it, and that even now the question of its disposal must be approached with the most diplomatic obliquity.

Previous experience had taught me that all Eleanor’s “cases” presented a harrowing similarity of detail. No circumstance tending to excite the spectator’s sympathy and involve his action was omitted from the history of her beneficiaries; the lights and shades were indeed so skilfully adjusted that any impartial expression of opinion took on the hue of cruelty. I could have produced closetfuls of “heirlooms” in attestation of this fact; for it is one more mark of Eleanor’s competence that her friends usually pay the interest on her philanthropy. My one hope was that in this case the object, being a picture, might reasonably be rated beyond my means; and as our cab drew up before a blistered brown-stone door-step I formed the self-defensive resolve to place an extreme valuation on Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. It is Eleanor’s fault if she is sometimes fought with her own weapons.

The house stood in one of those shabby provisional-looking New York streets that seem resignedly awaiting demolition. It was the kind of house that, in its high days, must have had a bow-window with a bronze in it. The bow-window had been replaced by a plumber’s devanture, and one might conceive the bronze to have gravitated to the limbo where Mexican onyx tables and bric-a-brac in buffalo-horn await the first signs of our next aesthetic reaction.

Eleanor swept me through a hall that smelled of poverty, up unlit stairs to a bare slit of a room. “And she must leave this in a month!” she whispered across her knock.

I had prepared myself for the limp widow’s weed of a woman that one figures in such a setting; and confronted abruptly with Mrs. Fontage’s white-haired erectness I had the disconcerting sense that I was somehow in her presence at my own solicitation. I instinctively charged Eleanor with this reversal of the situation; but a moment later I saw it must be ascribed to a something about Mrs. Fontage that precluded the possibility of her asking any one a favor. It was not that she was of forbidding, or even majestic, demeanor; but that one guessed, under her aquiline prettiness, a dignity nervously on guard against the petty betrayal of her surroundings. The room was unconcealably poor: the little faded “relics,” the high-stocked ancestral silhouettes, the steel-engravings after Raphael and Correggio, grouped in a vain attempt to hide the most obvious stains on the wall-paper, served only to accentuate the contrast of a past evidently diversified by foreign travel and the enjoyment of the arts. Even Mrs. Fontage’s dress had the air of being a last expedient, the ultimate outcome of a much-taxed ingenuity in darning and turning. One felt that all the poor lady’s barriers were falling save that of her impregnable manner.

To this manner I found myself conveying my appreciation of being admitted to a view of the Rembrandt.

Mrs. Fontage’s smile took my homage for granted. “It is always,” she conceded, “a privilege to be in the presence of the great masters.” Her slim wrinkled hand waved me to a dusky canvas near the window.

“It’s so interesting, dear Mrs. Fontage,” I heard Eleanor exclaiming, “and my cousin will be able to tell you exactly—“ Eleanor, in my presence, always admits that she knows nothing about art; but she gives the impression that this is merely because she hasn’t had time to look into the matter—and has had me to do it for her.

Mrs. Fontage seated herself without speaking, as though fearful that a breath might disturb my communion with the masterpiece. I felt that she thought Eleanor’s reassuring ejaculations ill-timed; and in this I was of one mind with her; for the impossibility of telling her exactly what I thought of her Rembrandt had become clear to me at a glance.

My cousin’s vivacities began to languish and the silence seemed to shape itself into a receptacle for my verdict. I stepped back, affecting a more distant scrutiny; and as I did so my eye caught Mrs. Fontage’s profile. Her lids trembled slightly. I took refuge in the familiar expedient of asking the history of the picture, and she waved me brightly to a seat.

This was indeed a topic on which she could dilate. The Rembrandt, it appeared, had come into Mr. Fontage’s possession many years ago, while the young couple were on their wedding-tour, and under circumstances so romantic that she made no excuse for relating them in all their parenthetic fulness. The picture belonged to an old Belgian Countess of redundant quarterings, whom the extravagances of an ungovernable nephew had compelled to part with her possessions (in the most private manner) about the time of the Fontages’ arrival. By a really remarkable coincidence, it happened that their courier (an exceptionally intelligent and superior man) was an old servant of the Countess’s, and had thus been able to put them in the way of securing the Rembrandt under the very nose of an English Duke, whose agent had been sent to Brussels to negotiate for its purchase. Mrs. Fontage could not recall the Duke’s name, but he was a great collector and had a famous Highland castle, where somebody had been murdered, and which she herself had visited (by moonlight) when she had travelled in Scotland as a girl. The episode had in short been one of the most interesting “experiences” of a tour almost chromo-lithographic in vivacity of impression; and they had always meant to go back to Brussels for the sake of reliving so picturesque a moment. Circumstances (of which the narrator’s surroundings declared the nature) had persistently interfered with the projected return to Europe, and the picture had grown doubly valuable as representing the high-water mark of their artistic emotions. Mrs. Fontage’s moist eye caressed the canvas. “There is only,” she added with a perceptible effort, “one slight drawback: the picture is not signed. But for that the Countess, of course, would have sold it to a museum. All the connoisseurs who have seen it pronounce it an undoubted Rembrandt, in the artist’s best manner; but the museums”—she arched her brows in smiling recognition of a well-known weakness—“give the preference to signed examples—“

Mrs. Fontage’s words evoked so touching a vision of the young tourists of fifty years ago, entrusting to an accomplished and versatile courier the direction of their helpless zeal for art, that I lost sight for a moment of the point at issue. The old Belgian Countess, the wealthy Duke with a feudal castle in Scotland, Mrs. Fontage’s own maiden pilgrimage to Arthur’s Seat and Holyrood, all the accessories of the naïf transaction, seemed a part of that vanished Europe to which our young race carried its indiscriminate ardors, its tender romantic credulity: the legendary castellated Europe of keepsakes, brigands and old masters, that compensated, by one such “experience” as Mrs. Fontage’s, for an after-life of aesthetic privation.

I was restored to the present by Eleanor’s looking at her watch. The action mutely conveyed that something was expected of me. I risked the temporizing statement that the picture was very interesting; but Mrs. Fontage’s polite assent revealed the poverty of the expedient. Eleanor’s impatience overflowed.

“You would like my cousin to give you an idea of its value?” she suggested.

Mrs. Fontage grew more erect. “No one,” she corrected with great gentleness, “can know its value quite as well as I, who live with it—“

We murmured our hasty concurrence.

“But it might be interesting to hear”—she addressed herself to me—“as a mere matter of curiosity—what estimate would be put on it from the purely commercial point of view—if such a term may be used in speaking of a work of art.”

I sounded a note of deprecation.

“Oh, I understand, of course,” she delicately anticipated me, “that that could never be your view, your personal view; but since occasions may arise—do arise—when it becomes necessary to—to put a price on the priceless, as it were—I have thought—Miss Copt has suggested—“

“Some day,” Eleanor encouraged her, “you might feel that the picture ought to belong to some one who has more—more opportunity of showing it—letting it be seen by the public—for educational reasons—“

“I have tried,” Mrs. Fontage admitted, “to see it in that light.”

The crucial moment was upon me. To escape the challenge of Mrs. Fontage’s brilliant composure I turned once more to the picture. If my courage needed reinforcement, the picture amply furnished it. Looking at that lamentable canvas seemed the surest way of gathering strength to denounce it; but behind me, all the while, I felt Mrs. Fontage’s shuddering pride drawn up in a final effort of self-defense. I hated myself for my sentimental perversion of the situation. Reason argued that it was more cruel to deceive Mrs. Fontage than to tell her the truth; but that merely proved the inferiority of reason to instinct in situations involving any concession to the emotions. Along with her faith in the Rembrandt I must destroy not only the whole fabric of Mrs. Fontage’s past, but even that lifelong habit of acquiescence in untested formulas that makes the best part of the average feminine strength. I guessed the episode of the picture to be inextricably interwoven with the traditions and convictions which served to veil Mrs. Fontage’s destitution not only from others but from herself. Viewed in that light the Rembrandt had perhaps been worth its purchase-money; and I regretted that works of art do not commonly sell on the merit of the moral support they may have rendered.

From this unavailing flight I was recalled by the sense that something must be done. To place a fictitious value on the picture was at best a provisional measure; while the brutal alternative of advising Mrs. Fontage to sell it for a hundred dollars at least afforded an opening to the charitably disposed purchaser. I intended, if other resources failed, to put myself forward in that light; but delicacy of course forbade my coupling my unflattering estimate of the Rembrandt with an immediate offer to buy it. All I could do was to inflict the wound: the healing unguent must be withheld for later application.

I turned to Mrs. Fontage, who sat motionless, her finely-lined cheeks touched with an expectant color, her eyes averted from the picture which was so evidently the one object they beheld.

“My dear madam—“ I began. Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me. It shrouded every alternative in darkness and I had the flurried sense of having lost my way among the intricacies of my contention. Of a sudden I felt the hopelessness of finding a crack in her impenetrable conviction. My words slipped from me like broken weapons. “The picture,” I faltered, “would of course be worth more if it were signed. As it is, I—I hardly think—on a conservative estimate—it can be valued at—at more—than—a thousand dollars, say—“

My deflected argument ran on somewhat aimlessly till it found itself plunging full tilt against the barrier of Mrs. Fontage’s silence. She sat as impassive as though I had not spoken. Eleanor loosed a few fluttering words of congratulation and encouragement, but their flight was suddenly cut short. Mrs. Fontage had risen with a certain solemnity.

“I could never,” she said gently—her gentleness was adamantine—“under any circumstances whatever, consider, for a moment even, the possibility of parting with the picture at such a price.”