Crucial Instances by Edith Wharton

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Her color flickered like a girl's. "Are you--sure of him?" she whispered,
as though putting him on his guard against a possible betrayal of trust.

"Sure! Sure! My dear lady--" he measured her again with his quick confident
glance. "Don't _you_ believe in him?"

She drew back with a confused murmur. "I--used to." She had left her
hands in his: their pressure seemed to send a warm current to her heart.
"It ruined my life!" she cried with sudden passion. He looked at her
perplexedly.

"I gave up everything," she went on wildly, "to keep him alive. I
sacrificed myself--others--I nursed his glory in my bosom and it died--and
left me--left me here alone." She paused and gathered her courage with a
gasp. "Don't make the same mistake!" she warned him.

He shook his head, still smiling. "No danger of that! You're not alone, my
dear lady. He's here with you--he's come back to you to-day. Don't you see
what's happened? Don't you see that it's your love that has kept him alive?
If you'd abandoned your post for an instant--let things pass into other
hands--if your wonderful tenderness hadn't perpetually kept guard--this
might have been--must have been--irretrievably lost." He laid his hand on
the pamphlet. "And then--then he _would_ have been dead!"

"Oh," she said, "don't tell me too suddenly!" And she turned away and sank
into a chair.

The young man stood watching her in an awed silence. For a long time she
sat motionless, with her face hidden, and he thought she must be weeping.

At length he said, almost shyly: "You'll let me come back, then? You'll
help me work this thing out?"

She rose calmly and held out her hand. "I'll help you," she declared.

"I'll come to-morrow, then. Can we get to work early?"

"As early as you please."

"At eight o'clock, then," he said briskly. "You'll have the papers ready?"

"I'll have everything ready." She added with a half-playful hesitancy: "And
the fire shall be lit for you."

He went out with his bright nod. She walked to the window and watched his
buoyant figure hastening down the elm-shaded street. When she turned back
into the empty room she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips.

THE RECOVERY

To the visiting stranger Hillbridge's first question was, "Have you seen
Keniston's things?" Keniston took precedence of the colonial State House,
the Gilbert Stuart Washington and the Ethnological Museum; nay, he ran neck
and neck with the President of the University, a prehistoric relic who had
known Emerson, and who was still sent about the country in cotton-wool to
open educational institutions with a toothless oration on Brook Farm.

Keniston was sent about the country too: he opened art exhibitions, laid
the foundation of academies, and acted in a general sense as the spokesman
and apologist of art. Hillbridge was proud of him in his peripatetic
character, but his fellow-townsmen let it be understood that to "know"
Keniston one must come to Hillbridge. Never was work more dependent for its
effect on "atmosphere," on _milieu_. Hillbridge was Keniston's milieu,
and there was one lady, a devotee of his art, who went so far as to assert
that once, at an exhibition in New York, she had passed a Keniston without
recognizing it. "It simply didn't want to be seen in such surroundings; it
was hiding itself under an incognito," she declared.

It was a source of special pride to Hillbridge that it contained all the
artist's best works. Strangers were told that Hillbridge had discovered
him. The discovery had come about in the simplest manner. Professor
Driffert, who had a reputation for "collecting," had one day hung a sketch
on his drawing-room wall, and thereafter Mrs. Driffert's visitors (always
a little flurried by the sense that it was the kind of house in which one
might be suddenly called upon to distinguish between a dry-point and an
etching, or between Raphael Mengs and Raphael Sanzio) were not infrequently
subjected to the Professor's off-hand inquiry, "By-the-way, have you seen
my Keniston?" The visitors, perceptibly awed, would retreat to a critical
distance and murmur the usual guarded generalities, while they tried to
keep the name in mind long enough to look it up in the Encyclopædia. The
name was not in the Encyclopædia; but, as a compensating fact, it became
known that the man himself was in Hillbridge. Hillbridge, then, owned an
artist whose celebrity it was the proper thing to take for granted! Some
one else, emboldened by the thought, bought a Keniston; and the next
year, on the occasion of the President's golden jubilee, the Faculty, by
unanimous consent, presented him with a Keniston. Two years later there
was a Keniston exhibition, to which the art-critics came from New York
and Boston; and not long afterward a well-known Chicago collector vainly
attempted to buy Professor Driffert's sketch, which the art journals cited
as a rare example of the painter's first or silvery manner. Thus there
gradually grew up a small circle of connoisseurs known in artistic, circles
as men who collected Kenistons.

Professor Wildmarsh, of the chair of Fine Arts and Archaeology, was the
first critic to publish a detailed analysis of the master's methods and
purpose. The article was illustrated by engravings which (though they had
cost the magazine a fortune) were declared by Professor Wildmarsh to give
but an imperfect suggestion of the esoteric significance of the originals.
The Professor, with a tact that contrived to make each reader feel himself
included among the exceptions, went on to say that Keniston's work would
never appeal to any but exceptional natures; and he closed with the usual
assertion that to apprehend the full meaning of the master's "message" it
was necessary to see him in the surroundings of his own home at Hillbridge.

Professor Wildmarsh's article was read one spring afternoon by a young
lady just speeding eastward on her first visit to Hillbridge, and already
flushed with anticipation of the intellectual opportunities awaiting her.
In East Onondaigua, where she lived, Hillbridge was looked on as an Oxford.
Magazine writers, with the easy American use of the superlative, designated
it as "the venerable Alma Mater," the "antique seat of learning," and
Claudia Day had been brought up to regard it as the fountain-head of
knowledge, and of that mental distinction which is so much rarer than
knowledge. An innate passion for all that was thus distinguished and
exceptional made her revere Hillbridge as the native soil of those
intellectual amenities that were of such difficult growth in the
thin air of East Onondaigua. At the first suggestion of a visit to
Hillbridge--whither she went at the invitation of a girl friend
who (incredible apotheosis!) had married one of the University
professors--Claudia's spirit dilated with the sense of new possibilities.
The vision of herself walking under the "historic elms" toward the Memorial
Library, standing rapt before the Stuart Washington, or drinking in,
from some obscure corner of an academic drawing-room, the President's
reminiscences of the Concord group--this vividness of self-projection into
the emotions awaiting her made her glad of any delay that prolonged so
exquisite a moment.

It was in this mood that she opened the article on Keniston. She knew about
him, of course; she was wonderfully "well up," even for East Onondaigua.
She had read of him in the magazines; she had met, on a visit to New York,
a man who collected Kenistons, and a photogravure of a Keniston in an
"artistic" frame hung above her writing-table at home. But Professor
Wildmarsh's article made her feel how little she really knew of the master;
and she trembled to think of the state of relative ignorance in which, but
for the timely purchase of the magazine, she might have entered Hillbridge.
She had, for instance, been densely unaware that Keniston had already had
three "manners," and was showing symptoms of a fourth. She was equally
ignorant of the fact that he had founded a school and "created a formula";
and she learned with a thrill that no one could hope to understand him who
had not seen him in his studio at Hillbridge, surrounded by his own works.
"The man and the art interpret each other," their exponent declared; and
Claudia Day, bending a brilliant eye on the future, wondered if she were
ever to be admitted to the privilege of that double initiation.

Keniston, to his other claims to distinction, added that of being hard to
know. His friends always hastened to announce the fact to strangers--adding
after a pause of suspense that they "would see what they could do."
Visitors in whose favor he was induced to make an exception were further
warned that he never spoke unless he was interested--so that they mustn't
mind if he remained silent. It was under these reassuring conditions that,
some ten days after her arrival at Hillbridge, Miss Day was introduced
to the master's studio. She found him a tall listless-looking man, who
appeared middle-aged to her youth, and who stood before his own pictures
with a vaguely interrogative gaze, leaving the task of their interpretation
to the lady who had courageously contrived the visit. The studio, to
Claudia's surprise, was bare and shabby. It formed a rambling addition to
the small cheerless house in which the artist lived with his mother and
a widowed sister. For Claudia it added the last touch to his distinction
to learn that he was poor, and that what he earned was devoted to the
maintenance of the two limp women who formed a neutral-tinted background to
his impressive outline. His pictures of course fetched high prices; but he
worked slowly--"painfully," as his devotees preferred to phrase it--with
frequent intervals of ill health and inactivity, and the circle of Keniston
connoisseurs was still as small as it was distinguished. The girl's fancy
instantly hailed in him that favorite figure of imaginative youth, the
artist who would rather starve than paint a pot-boiler. It is known to
comparatively few that the production of successful pot-boilers is an art
in itself, and that such heroic abstentions as Keniston's are not always
purely voluntary. On the occasion of her first visit the artist said so
little that Claudia was able to indulge to the full the harrowing sense of
her inadequacy. No wonder she had not been one of the few that he cared
to talk to; every word she uttered must so obviously have diminished the
inducement! She had been cheap, trivial, conventional; at once gushing
and inexpressive, eager and constrained. She could feel him counting the
minutes till the visit was over, and as the door finally closed on the
scene of her discomfiture she almost shared the hope with which she
confidently credited him--that they might never meet again.

II

Mrs. Davant glanced reverentially about the studio. "I have always said,"
she murmured, "that they ought to be seen in Europe."

Mrs. Davant was young, credulous and emotionally extravagant: she reminded
Claudia of her earlier self--the self that, ten years before, had first set
an awestruck foot on that very threshold.

"Not for _his_ sake," Mrs. Davant continued, "but for Europe's."

Claudia smiled. She was glad that her husband's pictures were to be
exhibited in Paris. She concurred in Mrs. Davant's view of the importance
of the event; but she thought her visitor's way of putting the case a
little overcharged. Ten years spent in an atmosphere of Keniston-worship
had insensibly developed in Claudia a preference for moderation of speech.
She believed in her husband, of course; to believe in him, with an
increasing abandonment and tenacity, had become one of the necessary laws
of being; but she did not believe in his admirers. Their faith in him was
perhaps as genuine as her own; but it seemed to her less able to give an
account of itself. Some few of his appreciators doubtless measured him
by their own standards; but it was difficult not to feel that in the
Hillbridge circle, where rapture ran the highest, he was accepted on
what was at best but an indirect valuation; and now and then she had a
frightened doubt as to the independence of her own convictions. That
innate sense of relativity which even East Onondaigua had not been able to
check in Claudia Day had been fostered in Mrs. Keniston by the artistic
absolutism of Hillbridge, and she often wondered that her husband remained
so uncritical of the quality of admiration accorded him. Her husband's
uncritical attitude toward himself and his admirers had in fact been one of
the surprises of her marriage. That an artist should believe in his
potential powers seemed to her at once the incentive and the pledge of
excellence: she knew there was no future for a hesitating talent. What
perplexed her was Keniston's satisfaction in his achievement. She had
always imagined that the true artist must regard himself as the imperfect
vehicle of the cosmic emotion--that beneath every difficulty overcome a new
one lurked, the vision widening as the scope enlarged. To be initiated into
these creative struggles, to shed on the toiler's path the consolatory ray
of faith and encouragement, had seemed the chief privilege of her marriage.
But there is something supererogatory in believing in a man obviously
disposed to perform that service for himself; and Claudia's ardor gradually
spent itself against the dense surface of her husband's complacency. She
could smile now at her vision of an intellectual communion which should
admit her to the inmost precincts of his inspiration. She had learned
that the creative processes are seldom self-explanatory, and Keniston's
inarticulateness no longer discouraged her; but she could not reconcile
her sense of the continuity of all high effort to his unperturbed air
of finishing each picture as though he had despatched a masterpiece to
posterity. In the first recoil from her disillusionment she even allowed
herself to perceive that, if he worked slowly, it was not because he
mistrusted his powers of expression, but because he had really so little to
express.

"It's for Europe," Mrs. Davant vaguely repeated; and Claudia noticed that
she was blushingly intent on tracing with the tip of her elaborate sunshade
the pattern of the shabby carpet.

"It will be a revelation to them," she went on provisionally, as though
Claudia had missed her cue and left an awkward interval to fill.

Claudia had in fact a sudden sense of deficient intuition. She felt that
her visitor had something to communicate which required, on her own part,
an intelligent co-operation; but what it was her insight failed to suggest.
She was, in truth, a little tired of Mrs. Davant, who was Keniston's latest
worshipper, who ordered pictures recklessly, who paid for them regally
in advance, and whose gallery was, figuratively speaking, crowded with
the artist's unpainted masterpieces. Claudia's impatience was perhaps
complicated by the uneasy sense that Mrs. Davant was too young, too rich,
too inexperienced; that somehow she ought to be warned.--Warned of what?
That some of the pictures might never be painted? Scarcely that, since
Keniston, who was scrupulous in business transactions, might be trusted not
to take any material advantage of such evidence of faith. Claudia's impulse
remained undefined. She merely felt that she would have liked to help Mrs.
Davant, and that she did not know how.

"You'll be there to see them?" she asked, as her visitor lingered.

"In Paris?" Mrs. Davant's blush deepened. "We must all be there together."

Claudia smiled. "My husband and I mean to go abroad some day--but I don't
see any chance of it at present."

"But he _ought_ to go--you ought both to go this summer!" Mrs. Davant
persisted. "I know Professor Wildmarsh and Professor Driffert and all the
other critics think that Mr. Keniston's never having been to Europe has
given his work much of its wonderful individuality, its peculiar flavor
and meaning--but now that his talent is formed, that he has full command
of his means of expression," (Claudia recognized one of Professor
Driffert's favorite formulas) "they all think he ought to see the work of
the _other_ great masters--that he ought to visit the home of his
ancestors, as Professor Wildmarsh says!" She stretched an impulsive hand to
Claudia. "You ought to let him go, Mrs. Keniston!"

Claudia accepted the admonition with the philosophy of the wife who is used
to being advised on the management of her husband. "I sha'n't interfere
with him," she declared; and Mrs. Davant instantly caught her up with a cry
of, "Oh, it's too lovely of you to say that!" With this exclamation she
left Claudia to a silent renewal of wonder.

A moment later Keniston entered: to a mind curious in combinations it
might have occurred that he had met Mrs. Davant on the door-step. In one
sense he might, for all his wife cared, have met fifty Mrs. Davants on the
door-step: it was long since Claudia had enjoyed the solace of resenting
such coincidences. Her only thought now was that her husband's first words
might not improbably explain Mrs. Davant's last; and she waited for him to
speak.

He paused with his hands in his pockets before an unfinished picture on the
easel; then, as his habit was, he began to stroll touristlike from canvas
to canvas, standing before each in a musing ecstasy of contemplation that
no readjustment of view ever seemed to disturb. Her eye instinctively
joined his in its inspection; it was the one point where their natures
merged. Thank God, there, was no doubt about the pictures! She was what she
had always dreamed of being--the wife of a great artist. Keniston dropped
into an armchair and filled his pipe. "How should you like to go to
Europe?" he asked.

His wife looked up quickly. "When?"

"Now--this spring, I mean." He paused to light the pipe. "I should like to
be over there while these things are being exhibited."

Claudia was silent.

"Well?" he repeated after a moment.

"How can we afford it?" she asked.

Keniston had always scrupulously fulfilled his duty to the mother and
sister whom his marriage had dislodged; and Claudia, who had the atoning
temperament which seeks to pay for every happiness by making it a source
of fresh obligations, had from the outset accepted his ties with an
exaggerated devotion. Any disregard of such a claim would have vulgarized
her most delicate pleasures; and her husband's sensitiveness to it in great
measure extenuated the artistic obtuseness that often seemed to her like a
failure of the moral sense. His loyalty to the dull women who depended on
him was, after all, compounded of finer tissues than any mere sensibility
to ideal demands.

"Oh, I don't see why we shouldn't," he rejoined. "I think we might manage
it."

"At Mrs. Davant's expense?" leaped from Claudia. She could not tell why she
had said it; some inner barrier seemed to have given way under a confused
pressure of emotions.

He looked up at her with frank surprise. "Well, she has been very jolly
about it--why not? She has a tremendous feeling for art--the keenest I
ever knew in a woman." Claudia imperceptibly smiled. "She wants me to let
her pay in advance for the four panels she has ordered for the Memorial
Library. That would give us plenty of money for the trip, and my having the
panels to do is another reason for my wanting to go abroad just now."

"Another reason?"

"Yes; I've never worked on such a big scale. I want to see how those old
chaps did the trick; I want to measure myself with the big fellows over
there. An artist ought to, once in his life."

She gave him a wondering look. For the first time his words implied a sense
of possible limitation; but his easy tone seemed to retract what they
conceded. What he really wanted was fresh food for his self-satisfaction:
he was like an army that moves on after exhausting the resources of the
country.

Womanlike, she abandoned the general survey of the case for the
consideration of a minor point.

"Are you sure you can do that kind of thing?" she asked.

"What kind of thing?"

"The panels."

He glanced at her indulgently: his self-confidence was too impenetrable to
feel the pin-prick of such a doubt.

"Immensely sure," he said with a smile.

"And you don't mind taking so much money from her in advance?"

He stared. "Why should I? She'll get it back--with interest!" He laughed
and drew at his pipe. "It will be an uncommonly interesting experience. I
shouldn't wonder if it freshened me up a bit."

She looked at him again. This second hint of self-distrust struck her as
the sign of a quickened sensibility. What if, after all, he was beginning
to be dissatisfied with his work? The thought filled her with a renovating
sense of his sufficiency.

III

They stopped in London to see the National Gallery.

It was thus that, in their inexperience, they had narrowly put it; but in
reality every stone of the streets, every trick of the atmosphere, had
its message of surprise for their virgin sensibilities. The pictures were
simply the summing up, the final interpretation, of the cumulative pressure
of an unimagined world; and it seemed to Claudia that long before they
reached the doors of the gallery she had some intuitive revelation of what
awaited them within.

They moved about from room to room without exchanging a word. The vast
noiseless spaces seemed full of sound, like the roar of a distant multitude
heard only by the inner ear. Had their speech been articulate their
language would have been incomprehensible; and even that far-off murmur
of meaning pressed intolerably on Claudia's nerves. Keniston took the
onset without outward sign of disturbance. Now and then he paused before a
canvas, or prolonged from one of the benches his silent communion with some
miracle of line or color; but he neither looked at his wife nor spoke to
her. He seemed to have forgotten her presence.

Claudia was conscious of keeping a furtive watch on him; but the sum total
of her impressions was negative. She remembered thinking when she first
met him that his face was rather expressionless; and he had the habit of
self-engrossed silences.

All that evening, at the hotel, they talked about London, and he surprised
her by an acuteness of observation that she had sometimes inwardly accused
him of lacking. He seemed to have seen everything, to have examined, felt,
compared, with nerves as finely adjusted as her own; but he said nothing
of the pictures. The next day they returned to the National Gallery, and
he began to study the paintings in detail, pointing out differences of
technique, analyzing and criticising, but still without summing up his
conclusions. He seemed to have a sort of provincial dread of showing
himself too much impressed. Claudia's own sensations were too complex, too
overwhelming, to be readily classified. Lacking the craftsman's instinct to
steady her, she felt herself carried off her feet by the rush of incoherent
impressions. One point she consciously avoided, and that was the comparison
of her husband's work with what they were daily seeing. Art, she inwardly
argued, was too various, too complex, dependent on too many inter-relations
of feeling and environment, to allow of its being judged by any provisional
standard. Even the subtleties of technique must be modified by the artist's
changing purpose, as this in turn is acted on by influences of which
he is himself unconscious. How, then, was an unprepared imagination to
distinguish between such varied reflections of the elusive vision? She took
refuge in a passionate exaggeration of her own ignorance and insufficiency.

After a week in London they went to Paris. The exhibition of Keniston's
pictures had been opened a few days earlier; and as they drove through the
streets on the way to the station an "impressionist" poster here and there
invited them to the display of the American artist's work. Mrs. Davant, who
had been in Paris for the opening, had already written rapturously of the
impression produced, enclosing commendatory notices from one or two papers.
She reported that there had been a great crowd on the first day, and that
the critics had been "immensely struck."

The Kenistons arrived in the evening, and the next morning Claudia, as a
matter of course, asked her husband at what time he meant to go and see the
pictures.

He looked up absently from his guide-book.

"What pictures?"

"Why--yours," she said, surprised.

"Oh, they'll keep," he answered; adding with a slightly embarrassed laugh,
"We'll give the other chaps a show first." Presently he laid down his book
and proposed that they should go to the Louvre.

They spent the morning there, lunched at a restaurant near by, and returned
to the gallery in the afternoon. Keniston had passed from inarticulateness
to an eager volubility. It was clear that he was beginning to co-ordinate
his impressions, to find his way about in a corner of the great imaginative
universe. He seemed extraordinarily ready to impart his discoveries; and
Claudia felt that her ignorance served him as a convenient buffer against
the terrific impact of new sensations.

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