The New York Stories of Edith Wharton Read online

  I winced. Yes, it was true—we had all asked Vard to dine. It was some comfort to think that fate had made him expiate our weakness.

  Lillo put the sketch on the mantelshelf and drew his armchair to the fire.

  “It’s cold tonight. Take another cigar, old man; and some whiskey? There ought to be a bottle and some glasses in that cupboard behind you. Help yourself.”

  II

  About Vard’s portrait? (He began.) Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a queer story, and most people wouldn’t see anything in it. My enemies might say it was a roundabout way of explaining a failure; but you know better than that. Mrs. Mellish was right. Between me and Vard there could be no question of failure. The man was made for me—I felt that the first time I clapped eyes on him. I could hardly keep from asking him to sit to me on the spot; but somehow one couldn’t ask favors of the fellow. I sat still and prayed he’d come to me, though; for I was looking for something big for the next Salon. It was twelve years ago—the last time I was out here—and I was ravenous for an opportunity. I had the feeling—do you writer fellows have it too?—that there was something tremendous in me if it could only be got out; and I felt Vard was the Moses to strike the rock. There were vulgar reasons, too, that made me hunger for a victim. I’d been grinding on obscurely for a good many years, without gold or glory, and the first thing of mine that had made a noise was my picture of Pepita, exhibited the year before. There’d been a lot of talk about that, orders were beginning to come in, and I wanted to follow it up with a rousing big thing at the next Salon. Then the critics had been insinuating that I could do only Spanish things—I suppose I had overdone the castanet business; it’s a nursery disease we all go through—and I wanted to show that I had plenty more shot in my locker. Don’t you get up every morning meaning to prove you’re equal to Balzac or Thackeray? That’s the way I felt then; only give me a chance, I wanted to shout out to them; and I saw at once that Vard was my chance.

  I had come over from Paris in the autumn to paint Mrs. Clingsborough, and I met Vard and his daughter at one of the first dinners I went to. After that I could think of nothing but that man’s head. What a type! I raked up all the details of his scandalous history; and there were enough to fill an encyclopedia. The papers were full of him just then; he was mud from head to foot; it was about the time of the big viaduct steal, and irreproachable citizens were forming ineffectual leagues to put him down. And all the time one kept meeting him at dinners—that was the beauty of it! Once I remember seeing him next to the Bishop’s wife—I’ve got a little sketch of that duet somewhere—well, he was simply magnificent, a born ruler; what a splendid condottiere he would have made, in gold armor, with a griffin grinning on his casque! You remember those drawings of Leonardo’s, where the knight’s face and the outline of his helmet combine in one monstrous saurian profile? He always reminded me of that....

  But how was I to get at him? One day it occurred to me to try talking to Miss Vard. She was a monosyllabic person, who didn’t seem to see an inch beyond the last remark one had made; but suddenly I found myself blurting out, “I wonder if you know how extraordinarily paintable your father is?” and you should have seen the change that came over her. Her eyes lit up and she looked—well, as I’ve tried to make her look there. (He glanced up at the sketch.) Yes, she said, wasn’t her father splendid, and didn’t I think him one of the handsomest men I’d ever seen?

  That rather staggered me, I confess; I couldn’t think her capable of joking on such a subject, yet it seemed impossible that she should be speaking seriously. But she was. I knew it by the way she looked at Vard, who was sitting opposite, his wolfish profile thrown back, the shaggy locks tossed off his narrow high white forehead. The girl worshipped him.

  She went on to say how glad she was that I saw him as she did. So many artists admired only regular beauty, the stupid Greek type that was made to be done in marble; but she’d always fancied from what she’d seen of my work—she knew everything I’d done, it appeared—that I looked deeper, cared more for the way in which faces are modeled by temperament and circumstance; “and of course in that sense,” she concluded, “my father’s face is beautiful.”

  This was even more staggering; but one couldn’t question her divine sincerity. I’m afraid my one thought was to take advantage of it; and I let her go on, perceiving that if I wanted to paint Vard all I had to do was to listen.

  She poured out her heart. It was a glorious thing for a girl, she said, wasn’t it, to be associated with such a life as that? She felt it so strongly, sometimes, that it oppressed her, made her shy and stupid. She was so afraid people would expect her to live up to him. But that was absurd, of course; brilliant men so seldom had clever children. Still—did I know?—she would have been happier, much happier, if he hadn’t been in public life; if he and she could have hidden themselves away somewhere, with their books and music, and she could have had it all to herself: his cleverness, his learning, his immense unbounded goodness. For no one knew how good he was; no one but herself. Everybody recognized his cleverness, his brilliant abilities; even his enemies had to admit his extraordinary intellectual gifts, and hated him the worse, of course, for the admission; but no one, no one could guess what he was at home. She had heard of great men who were always giving gala performances in public, but whose wives and daughters saw only the empty theater, with the footlights out and the scenery stacked in the wings; but with him it was just the other way: wonderful as he was in public, in society, she sometimes felt he wasn’t doing himself justice—he was so much more wonderful at home. It was like carrying a guilty secret about with her: his friends, his admirers, would never forgive her if they found out that he kept all his best things for her!

  I don’t quite know what I felt in listening to her. I was chiefly taken up with leading her on to the point I had in view; but even through my personal preoccupation I remember being struck by the fact that, though she talked foolishly, she didn’t talk like a fool. She was not stupid; she was not obtuse; one felt that her impassive surface was alive with delicate points of perception; and this fact, coupled with her crystalline frankness, flung me back on a started revision of my impressions of her father. He came out of the test more monstrous than ever, as an ugly image reflected in clear water is made uglier by the purity of the medium. Even then I felt a pang at the use to which fate had put the mountain pool of Miss Vard’s spirit, and an uneasy sense that my own reflection there was not one to linger over. It was odd that I should have scrupled to deceive, on one small point, a girl already so hugely cheated; perhaps it was the completeness of her delusion that gave it the sanctity of a religious belief. At any rate, a distinct sense of discomfort tempered at the satisfaction with which, a day or two later, I heard from her that her father had consented to give me a few sittings.

  I’m afraid my scruples vanished when I got him before my easel. He was immense, and he was unexplored. From my point of view he’d never been done before—I was his Cortez. As he talked the wonder grew. His daughter came with him, and I began to think she was right in saying that he kept his best for her. It wasn’t that she drew him out, or guided the conversation; but one had a sense of delicate vigilance, hardly more perceptible than one of those atmospheric influences that give the pulses a happier turn. She was a vivifying climate. I had meant to turn the talk to public affairs, but it slipped toward books and art, and I was faintly aware of its being kept there without undue pressure. Before long I saw the value of the diversion. It was easy enough to get at the political Vard: the other aspect was rarer and more instructive. His daughter had described him as a scholar. He wasn’t that, of course, in any intrinsic sense: like most men of his type he had gulped his knowledge standing, as he had snatched his food from lunch counters; the wonder of it lay in his extraordinary power of assimilation. It was the strangest instance of a mind to which erudition had given force and fluency without culture; his learning had not educated his perceptions: it was an implement serving to
slash others rather than to polish himself. I have said that at first sight he was immense; but as I studied him he began to lessen under my scrutiny. His depth was a false perspective painted on a wall.

  It was there that my difficulty lay: I had prepared too big a canvas for him. Intellectually his scope was considerable, but it was like the digital reach of a mediocre pianist—it didn’t make him a great musician. And morally he wasn’t bad enough; his corruption wasn’t sufficiently imaginative to be interesting. It was not so much a means to an end as a kind of virtuosity practiced for its own sake, like a highly-developed skill in cannoning billiard balls. After all, the point of view is what gives distinction to either vice or virtue: a morality with ground-glass windows is no duller than a narrow cynicism.

  His daughter’s presence—she always came with him—gave unintentional emphasis to these conclusions; for where she was richest he was naked. She had a deep-rooted delicacy that drew color and perfume from the very center of her being: his sentiments, good or bad, were as detachable as his cuffs. Thus her nearness, planned, as I guessed, with the tender intention of displaying, elucidating him, of making him accessible in detail to my dazzled perceptions—this pious design in fact defeated itself. She made him appear at his best, but she cheapened that best by her proximity. For the man was vulgar to the core; vulgar in spite of his force and magnitude; thin, hollow, spectacular; a lath-and-plaster bogey.

  Did she suspect it? I think not—then. He was wrapped in her impervious faith. The papers? Oh, their charges were set down to political rivalry; and the only people she saw were his hangers-on, or the fashionable set who had taken him up for their amusement. Besides, she would never have found out in that way: at a direct accusation her resentment would have flamed up and smothered her judgment. If the truth came to her, it would come through knowing intimately some one—different; through—how shall I put it?—an imperceptible shifting of her center of gravity. My besetting fear was that I couldn’t count on her obtuseness. She wasn’t what is called clever; she left that to him; but she was exquisitely good; and now and then she had intuitive felicities that frightened me. Do I make you see her? We fellows can explain better with a brush; I don’t know how to mix my words or lay them on. She wasn’t clever; but her heart thought—that’s all I can say.

  If she’d been stupid it would have been easy enough: I could have painted him as he was. Could have? I did—brushed the face in one day from memory; it was the very man! I painted it out before she came: I couldn’t bear to have her see it. I had the feeling that I held her faith in my hands, carrying it like a brittle object through a jostling mob; a hair’s breadth swerve and it was in splinters.

  When she wasn’t there I tried to reason myself out of these subtleties. My business was to paint Vard as he was—if his daughter didn’t mind his looks, why should I? The opportunity was magnificent—I knew that by the way his face had leapt out of the canvas at my first touch. It would have been a big thing. Before every sitting I swore to myself I’d do it; then she came, and sat near him, and I—didn’t.

  I knew that before long she’d notice I was shirking the face. Vard himself took little interest in the portrait, but she watched me closely, and one day when the sitting was over she stayed behind and asked me when I meant to begin what she called “the likeness.” I guessed from her tone that the embarrassment was all on my side, or that if she felt any it was at having to touch a vulnerable point in my pride. Thus far the only doubt that troubled her was a distrust of my ability. Well, I put her off with any rot you please: told her she must trust me, must let me wait for the inspiration; that some day the face would come; I should see it suddenly—feel it under my brush.... The poor child believed me: you can make a woman believe almost anything she doesn’t quite understand. She was abashed at her philistinism, and begged me not to tell her father—he would make such fun of her!

  After that—well, the sittings went on. Not many, of course; Vard was too busy to give me much time. Still, I could have done him ten times over. Never had I found my formula with such ease, such assurance; there were no hesitations, no obstructions—the face was there, waiting for me; at times it almost shaped itself on the canvas. Unfortunately Miss Vard was there too....

  All this time the papers were busy with the viaduct scandal. The outcry was getting louder. You remember the circumstances? One of Vard’s associates—Bardwell, wasn’t it?—threatened disclosures. The rival machine got hold of him, the Independents took him to their bosom, and the press shrieked for an investigation. It was not the first storm Vard had weathered, and his face wore just the right shade of cool vigilance; he wasn’t the man to fall into the mistake of appearing too easy. His demeanor would have been superb if it had been inspired by a sense of his own strength; but it struck me rather as based on contempt for his antagonists. Success is an inverted telescope through which one’s enemies are apt to look too small and too remote. As for Miss Vard, her serenity was undiminished; but I half-detected a defiance in her unruffled sweetness, and during the last sittings I had the factitious vivacity of a hostess who hears her best china crashing.

  One day it did crash: the headlines of the morning papers shouted the catastrophe at me—“The Monster forced to disgorge—Warrant out against Vard—Bardwell the Boss’s Boomerang”—you know the kind of thing.

  When I had read the papers I threw them down and went out. As it happened, Vard was to have given me a sitting that morning: but there would have been a certain irony in waiting for him. I wished I had finished the picture—I wished I’d never thought of painting it. I wanted to shake off the whole business, to put it out of my mind, if I could. I had the feeling—I don’t know if I can describe it—that there was a kind of disloyalty to the poor girl in my even acknowledging to myself that I knew what all the papers were howling from the house-tops.

  I had walked for an hour when it suddenly occurred to me that Miss Vard might, after all, come to the studio at the appointed hour. Why should she? I could conceive of no reason; but the mere thought of what, if she did come, my absence would imply to her, sent me bolting back to Twelfth Street. It was a presentiment, if you like, for she was there.

  As she rose to meet me a newspaper slipped from her hand. I’d been fool enough, when I went out, to leave the damned things lying all over the place.

  I muttered some apology for being late, and she said reassuringly:

  “But my father’s not here yet.”

  “Your father—?” I could have kicked myself for the way I bungled it!

  “He went out very early this morning, and left word that he would meet me here at the usual hour.”

  She faced me, with an eye full of bright courage, across the newspaper lying between us.

  “He ought to be here in a moment now—he’s always so punctual. But my watch is a little fast, I think.”

  She held it out to me almost gaily, and I was just pretending to compare it with mine, when there was a smart rap on the door and Vard stalked in. There was always a civic majesty in his gait, an air of having just stepped off his pedestal and of dissembling an oration in his umbrella; and that day he surpassed himself. Miss Vard had turned pale at the knock; but the mere sight of him replenished her veins, and if she now avoided my eye, it was in mere pity for my discomfiture.

  I was in fact the only one of the three who didn’t instantly “play up”; but such virtuosity was inspiring, and by the time Vard had thrown off his coat and dropped into a senatorial pose, I was ready to pitch into my work. I swore I’d do his face then and there; do it as she saw it; she sat close to him, and I had only to glance at her while I painted.

  Vard himself was masterly: his talk rattled through my hesitations and embarrassments like a brisk northwester sweeping the dry leaves from its path. Even his daughter showed the sudden brilliance of a lamp from which the shade has been removed. We were all surprisingly vivid—it felt, somehow, as though we were being photographed by flashlight.

  It was the
best sitting we’d ever had—but unfortunately it didn’t last more than ten minutes.

  It was Vard’s secretary who interrupted us—a slinking chap called Cornley, who burst in, as white as sweetbread, with the face of a depositor who hears his bank has stopped payment. Miss Vard started up as he entered, but caught herself together and dropped back into her chair. Vard, who had taken out a cigarette, held the tip tranquilly to his fusee.

  “You’re here, thank God!” Cornley cried. “There’s no time to be lost, Mr. Vard. I’ve got a carriage waiting round the corner in Thirteenth Street—”

  Vard looked at the tip of his cigarette.

  “A carriage in Thirteenth Street? My good fellow, my own brougham is at the door.”

  “I know, I know—but they’re there too, sir; or they will be, inside of a minute. For God’s sake, Mr. Vard, don’t trifle!—There’s a way out by Thirteenth Street, I tell you!”

  “Bardwell’s myrmidons, eh?” said Vard. “Help me on with my overcoat, Cornley, will you?”

  Cornley’s teeth chattered.

  “Mr. Vard, your best friends... Miss Vard, won’t you speak to your father?” He turned to me haggardly, “We can get out by the back way?”

  I nodded.

  Vard stood towering—in some infernal way he seemed literally to rise to the situation—one hand in the bosom of his coat, in the attitude of patriotism in bronze. I glanced at his daughter: she hung on him with a drowning look. Suddenly she straightened herself; there was something of Vard in the way she faced her fears—a kind of primitive calm we drawing-room folk don’t have. She stepped to him and laid her hand on his arm. The pause hadn’t lasted ten seconds.

  “Father—” she said.

  Vard threw back his head and swept the studio with a sovereign eye.