The Greater Inclination

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"No," she returned; "I daresay he meant to be kind, but I didn't care to
be beholden to any friend of Arthur's. He came here again yesterday, but I
wouldn't see him, so he left a note giving me his aunt's address and
saying she'd have a room ready for me at any time."

There was a long silence; she had dried her tears and sat looking at
Woburn with eyes full of helpless reliance.

"Well," he said at length, "you did right not to take that man's money;
but this isn't the only alternative," he added, pointing to the revolver.

"I don't know any other," she answered wearily. "I'm not smart enough to
get employment; I can't make dresses or do type-writing, or any of the
useful things they teach girls now; and besides, even if I could get work
I couldn't stand the loneliness. I can never hold my head up again--I
can't bear the disgrace. If I can't go back to Joe I'd rather be dead."

"And if you go back to Joe it will be all right?" Woburn suggested with a
smile.

"Oh," she cried, her whole face alight, "if I could only go back to Joe!"

They were both silent again; Woburn sat with his hands in his pockets
gazing at the floor. At length his silence seemed to rouse her to the
unwontedness of the situation, and she rose from her seat, saying in a
more constrained tone, "I don't know why I've told you all this."

"Because you believed that I would help you," Woburn answered, rising
also; "and you were right; I'm going to send you home."

She colored vividly. "You told me I was right not to take Mr. Devine's
money," she faltered.

"Yes," he answered, "but did Mr. Devine want to send you home?"

"He wanted me to wait at his aunt's a little while first and then write to
Joe again."

"I don't--I want you to start tomorrow morning; this morning, I mean. I'll
take you to the station and buy your ticket, and your husband can send me
back the money."

"Oh, I can't--I can't--you mustn't--" she stammered, reddening and paling.
"Besides, they'll never let me leave here without paying."

"How much do you owe?"

"Fourteen dollars."

"Very well; I'll pay that for you; you can leave me your revolver as a
pledge. But you must start by the first train; have you any idea at what
time it leaves the Grand Central?"

"I think there's one at eight."

He glanced at his watch.

"In less than two hours, then; it's after six now."

She stood before him with fascinated eyes.

"You must have a very strong will," she said. "When you talk like that you
make me feel as if I had to do everything you say."

"Well, you must," said Woburn lightly. "Man was made to be obeyed."

"Oh, you're not like other men," she returned; "I never heard a voice like
yours; it's so strong and kind. You must be a very good man; you remind me
of Joe; I'm sure you've got just such a nature; and Joe is the best man
I've ever seen."

Woburn made no reply, and she rambled on, with little pauses and fresh
bursts of confidence.

"Joe's a real hero, you know; he did the most splendid thing you ever
heard of. I think I began to tell you about it, but I didn't finish. I'll
tell you now. It happened just after we were married; I was mad with him
at the time, I'm afraid, but now I see how splendid he was. He'd been
telegraph operator at Hinksville for four years and was hoping that he'd
get promoted to a bigger place; but he was afraid to ask for a raise.
Well, I was very sick with a bad attack of pneumonia and one night the
doctor said he wasn't sure whether he could pull me through. When they
sent word to Joe at the telegraph office he couldn't stand being away from
me another minute. There was a poor consumptive boy always hanging round
the station; Joe had taught him how to operate, just to help him along; so
he left him in the office and tore home for half an hour, knowing he could
get back before the eastern express came along.

"He hadn't been gone five minutes when a freight-train ran off the rails
about a mile up the track. It was a very still night, and the boy heard
the smash and shouting, and knew something had happened. He couldn't tell
what it was, but the minute he heard it he sent a message over the wires
like a flash, and caught the eastern express just as it was pulling out of
the station above Hinksville. If he'd hesitated a second, or made any
mistake, the express would have come on, and the loss of life would have
been fearful. The next day the Hinksville papers were full of Operator
Glenn's presence of mind; they all said he'd be promoted. That was early
in November and Joe didn't hear anything from the company till the first
of January. Meanwhile the boy had gone home to his father's farm out in
the country, and before Christmas he was dead. Well, on New Year's day Joe
got a notice from the company saying that his pay was to be raised, and
that he was to be promoted to a big junction near Detroit, in recognition
of his presence of mind in stopping the eastern express. It was just what
we'd both been pining for and I was nearly wild with joy; but I noticed
Joe didn't say much. He just telegraphed for leave, and the next day he
went right up to Detroit and told the directors there what had really
happened. When he came back he told us they'd suspended him; I cried every
night for a week, and even his mother said he was a fool. After that we
just lived on at Hinksville, and six months later the company took him
back; but I don't suppose they'll ever promote him now."

Her voice again trembled with facile emotion.

"Wasn't it beautiful of him? Ain't he a real hero?" she said. "And I'm
sure you'd behave just like him; you'd be just as gentle about little
things, and you'd never move an inch about big ones. You'd never do a mean
action, but you'd be sorry for people who did; I can see it in your face;
that's why I trusted you right off."

Woburn's eyes were fixed on the window; he hardly seemed to hear her. At
length he walked across the room and pulled up the shade. The electric
lights were dissolving in the gray alembic of the dawn. A milk-cart
rattled down the street and, like a witch returning late from the Sabbath,
a stray cat whisked into an area. So rose the appointed day.

Woburn turned back, drawing from his pocket the roll of bills which he had
thrust there with so different a purpose. He counted them out, and handed
her fifteen dollars.

"That will pay for your board, including your breakfast this morning," he
said. "We'll breakfast together presently if you like; and meanwhile
suppose we sit down and watch the sunrise. I haven't seen it for years."

He pushed two chairs toward the window, and they sat down side by side.
The light came gradually, with the icy reluctance of winter; at last a red
disk pushed itself above the opposite house-tops and a long cold gleam
slanted across their window. They did not talk much; there was a silencing
awe in the spectacle.

Presently Woburn rose and looked again at his watch.

"I must go and cover up my dress-coat", he said, "and you had better put
on your hat and jacket. We shall have to be starting in half an hour."

As he turned away she laid her hand on his arm.

"You haven't even told me your name," she said.

"No," he answered; "but if you get safely back to Joe you can call me
Providence."

"But how am I to send you the money?"

"Oh--well, I'll write you a line in a day or two and give you my address;
I don't know myself what it will be; I'm a wanderer on the face of the
earth."

"But you must have my name if you mean to write to me."

"Well, what is your name?"

"Ruby Glenn. And I think--I almost think you might send the letter right
to Joe's--send it to the Hinksville station."

"Very well."

"You promise?"

"Of course I promise."

He went back into his room, thinking how appropriate it was that she
should have an absurd name like Ruby. As he re-entered the room, where the
gas sickened in the daylight, it seemed to him that he was returning to
some forgotten land; he had passed, with the last few hours, into a wholly
new phase of consciousness. He put on his fur coat, turning up the collar
and crossing the lapels to hide his white tie. Then he put his cigar-case
in his pocket, turned out the gas, and, picking up his hat and stick,
walked back through the open doorway.

Ruby Glenn had obediently prepared herself for departure and was standing
before the mirror, patting her curls into place. Her eyes were still red,
but she had the happy look of a child that has outslept its grief. On the
floor he noticed the tattered fragments of the letter which, a few hours
earlier, he had seen her place before the mirror.

"Shall we go down now?" he asked.

"Very well," she assented; then, with a quick movement, she stepped close
to him, and putting her hands on his shoulders lifted her face to his.

"I believe you're the best man I ever knew," she said, "the very best--
except Joe."

She drew back blushing deeply, and unlocked the door which led into the
passage-way. Woburn picked up her bag, which she had forgotten, and
followed her out of the room. They passed a frowzy chambermaid, who stared
at them with a yawn. Before the doors the row of boots still waited; there
was a faint new aroma of coffee mingling with the smell of vanished
dinners, and a fresh blast of heat had begun to tingle through the
radiators.

In the unventilated coffee-room they found a waiter who had the melancholy
air of being the last survivor of an exterminated race, and who
reluctantly brought them some tea made with water which had not boiled,
and a supply of stale rolls and staler butter. On this meagre diet they
fared in silence, Woburn occasionally glancing at his watch; at length he
rose, telling his companion to go and pay her bill while he called a
hansom. After all, there was no use in economizing his remaining dollars.

In a few moments she joined him under the portico of the hotel. The hansom
stood waiting and he sprang in after her, calling to the driver to take
them to the Forty-second Street station.

When they reached the station he found a seat for her and went to buy her
ticket. There were several people ahead of him at the window, and when he
had bought the ticket he found that it was time to put her in the train.
She rose in answer to his glance, and together they walked down the long
platform in the murky chill of the roofed-in air. He followed her into the
railway carriage, making sure that she had her bag, and that the ticket
was safe inside it; then he held out his hand, in its pearl-coloured
evening glove: he felt that the people in the other seats were staring at
them.

"Good-bye," he said.

"Good-bye," she answered, flushing gratefully. "I'll never forget--never.
And you _will_ write, won't you? Promise!"

"Of course, of course," he said, hastening from the carriage.

He retraced his way along the platform, passed through the dismal waiting-
room and stepped out into the early sunshine. On the sidewalk outside the
station he hesitated awhile; then he strolled slowly down Forty-second
Street and, skirting the melancholy flank of the Reservoir, walked across
Bryant Park. Finally he sat down on one of the benches near the Sixth
Avenue and lit a cigar. The signs of life were multiplying around him; he
watched the cars roll by with their increasing freight of dingy toilers,
the shop-girls hurrying to their work, the children trudging schoolward,
their small vague noses red with cold, their satchels clasped in woollen-
gloved hands. There is nothing very imposing in the first stirring of a
great city's activities; it is a slow reluctant process, like the waking
of a heavy sleeper; but to Woburn's mood the sight of that obscure renewal
of humble duties was more moving than the spectacle of an army with
banners.

He sat for a long time, smoking the last cigar in his case, and murmuring
to himself a line from Hamlet--the saddest, he thought, in the play--

_For every man hath business and desire_.

Suddenly an unpremeditated movement made him feel the pressure of Ruby
Glenn's revolver in his pocket; it was like a devil's touch on his arm,
and he sprang up hastily. In his other pocket there were just four dollars
and fifty cents; but that didn't matter now. He had no thought of flight.

For a few minutes he loitered vaguely about the park; then the cold drove
him on again, and with the rapidity born of a sudden resolve he began to
walk down the Fifth Avenue towards his lodgings. He brushed past a maid-
servant who was washing the vestibule and ran up stairs to his room. A
fire was burning in the grate and his books and photographs greeted him
cheerfully from the walls; the tranquil air of the whole room seemed to
take it for granted that he meant to have his bath and breakfast and go
down town as usual.

He threw off his coat and pulled the revolver out of his pocket; for some
moments he held it curiously in his hand, bending over to examine it as
Ruby Glenn had done; then he laid it in the top drawer of a small cabinet,
and locking the drawer threw the key into the fire.

After that he went quietly about the usual business of his toilet. In
taking off his dress-coat he noticed the Legion of Honor which Miss
Talcott had given him at the ball. He pulled it out of his buttonhole and
tossed it into the fire-place. When he had finished dressing he saw with
surprise that it was nearly ten o'clock. Ruby Glenn was already two hours
nearer home.

Woburn stood looking about the room of which he had thought to take final
leave the night before; among the ashes beneath the grate he caught sight
of a little white heap which symbolized to his fancy the remains of his
brief correspondence with Miss Talcott. He roused himself from this
unseasonable musing and with a final glance at the familiar setting of his
past, turned to face the future which the last hours had prepared for him.

He went down stairs and stepped out of doors, hastening down the street
towards Broadway as though he were late for an appointment. Every now and
then he encountered an acquaintance, whom he greeted with a nod and smile;
he carried his head high, and shunned no man's recognition.

At length he reached the doors of a tall granite building honey-combed
with windows. He mounted the steps of the portico, and passing through the
double doors of plate-glass, crossed a vestibule floored with mosaic to
another glass door on which was emblazoned the name of the firm.

This door he also opened, entering a large room with wainscotted
subdivisions, behind which appeared the stooping shoulders of a row of
clerks.

As Woburn crossed the threshold a gray-haired man emerged from an inner
office at the opposite end of the room.

At sight of Woburn he stopped short.

"Mr. Woburn!" he exclaimed; then he stepped nearer and added in a low
tone: "I was requested to tell you when you came that the members of the
firm are waiting; will you step into the private office?"

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 moustache 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 exaggerating 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 pick-pocket 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 brush-
work 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.

Every one 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 master-piece; 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, revelling in his genial villany, 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 Yard'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 some time--" 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 finished 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.

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