“Which picture?”
“Not the greatest name, but the very picture we need, because it has mystery, you see, and historical importance, and it’s virtually unique because only one other picture from the same hand is known to exist. It’s a picture that I dearly love, because it did more than anything else to establish me in my present place as an expert. You’ve seen it! A prize! The Marriage at Cana, by the so-called Alchemical Master!”
Intuition was now working furiously. “Why has she kept it? Aylwin, did you tell her you might still be able to arrange to buy it?”
“I may have dropped a hint to Max. You know how one talks in these deals.”
“Did you hint that I might put up the money?”
“Certainly your name came into it. And as you’re an old friend they have agreed to hold it for a month or so.”
“In other words, you have once again spent some money that you didn’t have assured. My money.”
“Come on, Frank, you know what these situations are like. Don’t talk like a banker.”
“I won’t buy it.”
“Frank—listen—I simply did what had to be done. Buying art on this level is extremely sensitive business. When I had Max and Amalie in the right mood I had to move quickly. You’ll see it all quite differently tomorrow.”
“No, I won’t. I will never buy that picture.”
“But why? Is it the money? Oh, Frank, don’t say it’s the money!”
“No, I give you my word it isn’t the money.”
“Then why?”
“I have personal reasons that I can’t explain. The Raphael, the Bronzino, two or three others—yes, I would have done it for you. But not The Marriage at Cana.”
“Why, why, why! You’ve got to tell me. You owe it to me to tell me!”
“Anything I owed you, Aylwin, has been paid in full with six excellent modern paintings. I won’t buy that picture, and that’s flat.”
“You shit, Frank!”
“Oh come, I should have thought that under these circumstances you could have found a quotation from Ben Jonson.”
“All right! ‘Turd in your teeth’.”
“Pretty good. Nothing else?”
“ ‘May dogs defile thy walls,
And wasps and hornets breed beneath thy roof,
This seat of falsehood and this cave of cozenage!’ ”
And Ross flung out of the room. To Francis it seemed that he was laughing at his own apt quotation, but in truth he was weeping. The two grimaces are not so far apart.
Francis washed his hands and retired to the narrow space he had kept for his bed. Before he went to sleep he looked long at a picture that puzzled those of his friends who had seen it, and that still hung over his bed’s head. It was not a great picture. It was a cheapish print of Love Locked Out and to him at present it was more poignant than any of his heaped-up masterworks.
OF COURSE Francis did the only possible thing. He couldn’t under any circumstances have allowed the friend he loved to be taken in by a picture he knew to be a fake, and his own fake at that, to place it in the principal gallery of the country to which they were both supposed to owe their first allegiance, said the Lesser Zadkiel.
—I disagree totally, said the Daimon Maimas. He could certainly have done it, and what he called his Mercurius influence—myself, really—urged him to do it. I reminded him of what Letztpfenning had said: What is being sold, a great picture or the magic of the past? Is it a work of grave beauty that is being purchased, or such a work given its real worth by the seal of four centuries? I was disgusted with Francis. Indeed, I nearly deserted him at that instant.
—Can you do that?
—You know I can. And when a man’s daimon leaves him, he is finished. You remember that when Mark Antony was playing the fool with that Egyptian woman his daimon left him in disgust. That was because of a stupid love, as well.
—Francis’s love for Ross was not stupid, brother. I thought it had a flavour of nobility, because it asked nothing.
—It made him betray what was best of himself.
—Questionable, brother. Love, or worldly gratification? Love, or vanity? Love, or a wry joke on the world of art that seemed to have no place for him? If poor Darcourt, who longs to know the truth about Francis, knew what we know, he would rank Francis very high.
—Darcourt is a Christian priest, and Christianity cost Francis dear. It gave him that double conscience we have seen plaguing him throughout his life. Darcourt would have said he did the right thing. I do not.
—Yet you did not reject him.
—I was disgusted with him. I hate to leave a job uncompleted. I was told to make Francis a great man, and he went directly contrary to my urging.
—Perhaps he was indeed a great man.
—Not the great man I would have made.
—You are not the final judge, brother.
—Nor was I wholly defeated, brother. Greatness is achieved in more than one way. Watch what follows.
THE SUICIDE OF AYLWIN ROSS caused the usual curiosity, the flow of easy pity, the satisfaction at having been witness at second hand to something that newspapers describe as a tragedy, in the public at large. The world of connoisseurship mourned him as a fine talent brought untimely to an end. In Canada it was assumed that he had been unable to bear public disgrace, and there were expressions of regret, mingling guilt with covert contempt that a man had broken under stress, when he should have taken his medicine like a little soldier. There was some speculation of the easy psychological kind that he had killed himself in order to make his enemies and detractors feel cheap, and although some of them did feel cheap they were angry with themselves for having been manipulated in such a way. In Parliament the Minister spoke briefly of Ross as a man who had meant well, but who was not a realist in public affairs; nevertheless, the Honourable Members were charged to think of him as a great Canadian. And the Honourable Members, who are accustomed to such work, obediently did so for a full minute. A memorial service was mounted at the National Gallery and the dead savant was accorded the usual public honours: poetry was spoken, some Bach was played, and the Deputy Minister read a carefully worded tribute, written by a minor poet from the pool of governmental speechwriters; it said many splendid things, but admitted nothing. It enjoined the National Gallery staff, and the nation, never to forget Aylwin Ross in its upward journey toward prudent, economical greatness.
As for Francis, who had suffered no nervous breakdown when Ruth was killed, he allowed himself such a collapse of the spirit now, and he toughed it out by himself in his cave of cozenage, living on beer and baked beans, cold from the can. Perhaps because he sought no professional help in dealing with his misery, he was as much himself in a few weeks as he would ever be again.
HIS FINAL YEARS were productive, in their way, and he had his satisfactions. These were years when it was fashionable to speak of the Century of the Common Man, but Francis saw little real evidence that it was so, and as he remembered his years at Carlyle Rural, spent with the Common Child, he was neither surprised nor regretful. People who met him casually thought him a misanthrope, but he had friends, drawn chiefly from the academic community. Extensive and curious knowledge of European life during the few centuries that most appealed to him established a kinship between Francis and Professor Clement Hollier, who sought historical truths in what many historians chose to overlook. Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt (the splendour of his title amused Francis) became a great friend because he and Francis were fellow enthusiasts for rare books, manuscripts, old calligraphy, caricatures, and a ragbag of half a dozen other things about which he was not always deeply informed, but that came within the net of his swelling collections. It was Darcourt who revived Francis’s sleeping love of music—better music than had ever been known to Mary-Ben—and they were often seen at concerts together.
There were evenings when these cronies gathered in the Old Curiosity Shop and while Hollier sat almost silent, Francis listened as Dar
court poured out a stream of lively, amusing, endearing talk, like wine bubbling out of the bottles that Darcourt always remembered to bring, for Francis was tight about hospitality. It amused him that Darcourt, something of a connoisseur, favoured vintages that bore the distinguished label of Prince Max on which the motto “Thou shalt perish ere I perish” was of course assumed to refer to the wine.
Another friend, not so close but valued, was Professor Urquhart McVarish, whose appeal to Francis (though McVarish never guessed it) was that in him there was something of the Mercurial spirit he felt so strongly in himself, though he kept it hidden, whereas McVarish let it rip, and boasted, and lied and cheated, with a vigour Francis found amusing and refreshing. It was Darcourt who persuaded Francis to read the works of Ben Jonson in a fine First Folio, and because of that Francis often addressed McVarish as Sir Epicure Mammon—a reference McVarish never troubled to check, and assumed to be complimentary. Indeed, in Jonson Francis discovered a spirit he would never have divined from the carefully chosen quotations of Aylwin Ross—a spirit apparently harsh, but inwardly tender, much like Francis himself.
McVarish had the Mercurial trait of thievery, as well; his method was the tried-and-true one of borrowing something which somehow he never remembered to return, and after the disappearance of a valued old gramophone record—Sir Harry Lauder singing “Stop Your Tickling, Jock”—Francis had to take care that only lesser objects got out of his hands to this merry, amoral Scot. But McVarish never felt the need to do anything in return for what arose from his friendship with Francis. It was Hollier and Darcourt who contrived to have Francis elected an honorary member of the Senior Common Room at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost in the University of Toronto—Francis’s old college, affectionately known as Spook. This was the reason why Francis put Spook down for a handsome inheritance in his will—the will that he now delighted to revise, daub with codicils, and play with.
The will cost him much thought, and some anxiety. He had the document acknowledging that what he had done about Little Charlie was all that the child could expect; but he prudently, though not very agreeably, had his London lawyers secure a document from Ismay, who was still pursuing The Workers’ Cause in the Midlands, guaranteeing that Little Charlie was not the child of his loins, and that neither Ismay nor Little Charlie could make any claim on his estate. This was not easy, because Ismay was still in law his wife, but Francis provided his lawyers with the names of one or two members of the profession who knew a good deal about Ismay, and could make things uncomfortable for her if she did not toe the line.
He was still enough of a McRory to feel that he must remember relatives in his will, and he arranged bequests—mean, in the light of his great wealth—to Larry and Michael. Something better, but by no means lavish, was left to his nephew Arthur, son of his brother Arthur. Now and then Francis felt some guilt about this young Arthur, some stirring of a parental instinct that was never really strong. But what has a man in his sixties to say to a boy? Francis had an un-evolved Canadian idea that an uncle ought to teach a boy to shoot, or fish, or make a wigwam out of birch bark, and such ideas filled him with dismay. The notion that the boy could be interested in art never entered his head. So to Arthur he remained a taciturn, rather smelly, un-Cornish old party who turned up now and then at family affairs, and who was always good at Christmas and birthdays for a handsome money gift. But although Francis was convinced that a boy must necessarily be interested only in what he himself thought of as boyish things, he saw a glint in Arthur’s eye which persuaded him, as the years passed and the boy became a man and an innovative, imaginative figure in the Cornish Trust, to name Arthur as his executor. With his three cronies, of course, to guide the supposedly Philistine young man in the disposal of his now unwieldy accumulation of art. For a collection it could no longer be called.
Once a week, if he remembered, he visited his mother, now in her mid-eighties, beautiful and frail, and with all her wits, if she chose to use them. They were both old people and it was possible for Francis to admit that he had never been on close terms with her, but that now he was past the obligatory, unquestioning love that had been required of him earlier, he quite liked her. She had once taken refuge in her useful vagueness when he asked about the first Francis, whom he still thought of as the Looner, but he thought he might sound her out about those flirtations, which had so embarrassed him as a boy, and which his father had brushed aside as insignificant.
“Mother, you have never told me anything about your youth. Were you and Father very much in love?”
“Franko, what an odd question! No: I wouldn’t say we were much in love, but he understood me wonderfully, and we were the greatest friends.”
“But were you never in love?”
“Oh—dozens of times. But I never took it very seriously, you know. How can one? It’s such a troublesome feeling if you let it go too far. I knew lots of men, but I never gave your father cause for anxiety. He was always Number One, and he knew it. He was rather a strange man, you know. He rode his life on a very easy rein.”
“I’m awfully glad to hear that.”
“Once, before your father came along, I was desperately in love, the way young girls are. He was the most beautiful man I have ever seen. Beauty is such a disturbing thing, isn’t it? I was so young, and he was an actor, and I never met him—only saw him on the stage, but that was the love that really hurt.”
“There were a lot of very handsome actors then. It was the fashion. Do you remember which one he was?”
“Oh, indeed I do. I think I’ve got a picture postcard of him somewhere still, in a play called Monsieur Beaucaire. His name was Lewis Waller. What a perfect man!”
So much, then, for Dr. J.A. and his scientific malice about an unspecified taint. This cool, ancient, beautiful flirt had loved once, and with abandonment, and the fruit of that passion was the Looner!
What a punishment! What a slap in the face for a Catholic girl from the God she had been taught to worship! No wonder she had put all passion from her, and had become, like Venus in the Bronzino Allegory, someone to whom love was a toy. Francis thought a great deal about it, and formed some highly philosophical conclusions. They were utterly mistaken, of course, because he knew nothing of the well-intentioned, maternally solicitous meddlings of Marie-Louise. Nobody ever knows the whole of anything. But if he had known, his compassion would doubtless have extended to his grandmother, as it now embraced more fully than ever before his mother, Zadok Hoyle, and that poor wretch, the Looner.
THUS IT WAS that when Francis came to die, he had pretty well made up his accounts with all the principal figures in his life, and although he seemed to the world, and even to his few close friends, an eccentric and crabbed spirit, there was a quality of completeness about him that bound those friends tighter than would have been the case if he had been filled with one-sided, know-nothing sweetness and easy acceptance.
The end of his life, though not of his fame, came on a September night, following a Sunday that had been close and humid as Toronto often is in September. As it was his birthday he had made himself go out to dinner, although he was not hungry, and afterward he lay on a sofa in the Old Curiosity Shop, hoping that a breeze from the window would help him to breathe more easily. The sofa had been Saraceni’s, and it was beautiful, but it was not well suited to lying; it was for some reclining beauty of the early nineteenth century, who saw herself in the image of Madame Récamier. But Francis could not make himself go to bed, and so when he felt the first shock of his quietus he was fully clothed, and in a position that was neither sitting nor lying. And after that shock, he knew he could not move.
Indeed, he knew he would never move again.
So this was it? Death, whom he had seen so often represented in art, usually as a figure of cruel menace, was there in the Old Curiosity Shop, and Francis was surprised to understand that he had no fear, though his breathing was now laborious and increasingly so. Well, one had always understood that th
ere must be some struggle.
His vision was clouding, but his mind was clear; uncommonly clear. The reflection drifted through his consciousness that this was very different from what Ross must have felt, dying of a surfeit of sleeping-pills washed down with gin. How different was it from the last hours of Ruth? Who could say what that burned body enveloped of an active, certainly courageous and wise mind? But death, though people prate about its universality, is doubtless individual in the way it comes to everyone.
His feeling was going, but another sort of feeling was taking its place. Was this the famous cliché of all one’s life passing before one’s eyes that drowning men are supposed to experience? It was not all of his life. Rather it was a sense of the completeness of his life, and an understanding—oh, this was luck, this was mercy!—of the fact that his life had not been such a formless muddle, not quite such a rum start, as he had come to believe. He was humble in the recognition that he had not done too badly, and that even things that he had often wished otherwise—the crushing of the wretched Letztpfennig, for instance—were part of a pattern not of his making, and the fulfilling of a destiny that was surely as much Letztpfennig’s as it was his own. Even his denial of Ross, which he had so often looked back on as a denial of love itself—death to the soul!—had been brought about as much by Ross as by any fault in himself. Ross was dear, as dear as Ruth, in another way, but something else was dearer and had to be protected. That was his one masterwork, The Marriage at Cana, now in a position of honour in a great gallery in the States, gloated over by lovers of art and by countless students who had university degrees in Fine Art, guaranteeing the infallibility of their knowledge and taste. If that bomb ever exploded, it would not explode in Canada, and ruin a friend.
No: that was hypocrisy, and he had no time now for hypocrisy. Surely Death had given a hint of His coming a week ago when he had carefully bundled up the preliminary studies, and those he had done after the fact, for The Marriage at Cana, and labelled them in careful Italic “My Drawings in Old Master style, for the National Gallery”. Some day, somebody would tumble to it.
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