What’s Bred in the Bone tct-2

by Robertson Davies

  These evenings were not long. Dinner was at eight, and was never over before nine, for though not a heavy meal it was served with what seemed to Francis extraordinary deliberation. Saraceni talked with the Countess. Francis was expected to talk to Miss Ruth Nibsmith, the governess. Amalie spoke only when spoken to by her grandmother. After dinner they sat for an hour, during which the Countess made one cup of coffee and one glass of cognac last the full time; sharp at ten Amalie kissed her grandmother, curtsied to Saraceni and Francis, and retired under the care of Miss Nibsmith. Then the Countess went to her private room, where, Saraceni told him, she worked over the farm accounts until eleven, at which hour she went to bed, in order to rise at six and spend two hours out of doors, directing her workers, before breakfast at eight.

  “A very regular existence,” said Saraceni.

  “Does nothing else ever happen?” said Francis.

  “Never. Except that on Sundays the priest comes for Mass at seven; you aren’t expected to attend, but it will give satisfaction if you do, and you shouldn’t miss the chapel; it is a Baroque marvel that you won’t see otherwise. But what do you mean—’Does nothing else ever happen?’ What do you suppose is happening? Money is being made, to begin with. This family was almost beggared during the War and the Countess’s father and now Countess Ottilie have made them almost as rich as they ever were—out of veal, which, as you know, is the staple diet of people in this part of the world. Amalie is being prepared for a brilliant marriage to somebody who hasn’t been chosen yet, but who will have to measure up to exacting standards. Great fortunes don’t go to fools—not at Düsterstein, anyhow. And there is the collection to be put into first-class order, and you and I will work on that like galley-slaves, for the Countess expects it. Isn’t that enough activity to satisfy your North American soul?”

  “Sorry to bring it up, but—do I get paid?”

  “Most certainly you do. First of all, you are privileged to work with me, and there are hundreds of young artists who would give anything for that high distinction. Next, you have an opportunity to study one of the very few notable collections still to remain in private hands. That means that you will be able to make an intimate day-by-day and mood-by-mood study of pictures that even the directors of world-famous galleries see only by carefully controlled appointment. The greatest are on loan to the Munich gallery, but there are splendid things here—things any of those galleries would be glad to possess. You are privileged to live on familiar terms with aristocrats—the Ingelheims of blood, myself of talent—in beautiful country surroundings. Every day you are given real cream and the best of veal. You have the cultivated conversation of La Nibsmith, and the transporting silences of Amalie. You can keep your little car in the stables. But as for money—no, no money; that would be adding sugar to honey. The Countess receives you here as my assistant. I am paid, of course, but not you. What do you want money for? You’re rich.”

  “I’m beginning to be afraid that stands between me and being an artist.”

  “There are worse disabilities. Want of talent, for instance. You have talent, and I shall show you how to use it.”

  To begin with, learning to use his talent seemed to mean a lot of dirty work, about the performance of which Saraceni was tyrannical and sarcastic. The silky expert Francis had met at Oxford and the patrician connoisseur he visited in Rome was an unappeasable slave-driver in the studio. During his first few days Francis did no work at all, but wandered freely through the castle to get the feel of things, as Saraceni put it.

  But on the first Sunday there was a violent change. Francis was up in time for chapel, and, as Saraceni had said, it was a Baroque marvel. At first sight it seemed to have a splendid dome in which the Last Judgement was set forth in swirling movement, but on examination this proved to be a trompe-l’oeil work of extraordinary skill, painted on a flat ceiling, and effective only if the observer did not go too far forward toward the altar; viewed from that point the supposed dome was distorted, and the sotto in su figures of the Trinity looked toad-like. The worshipper who went forward to receive the Host was not wise if he looked upward when he returned to his seat, for he would see a fiercely distorted God the Father and God the Son spying on him from the contrived dome. The chapel itself was small, but seemed big; the fat priest had to squeeze himself into the tiny elevated pulpit as if he were putting on tight trousers. The whole room was a wonder of gilding and plaster painted in those pinks and blues that look like confectioner’s work to the critic who refuses to surrender himself to their seductions. Francis was surprised to find himself alone in the chapel with Saraceni; the Countess and her granddaughter sat at the back, in an elevated box, as if at the opera, invisible to the less distinguished worshippers below. Theirs was the best view of the magical ceiling.

  After chapel, breakfast, at which Saraceni and Francis were served by themselves.

  “Now, to work,” said Saraceni. “Have you brought any overalls?”

  Francis had no overalls, but Saraceni fitted him out with a garment that might once have been a laboratory technician’s white coat, filthy with paint and oil.

  “Now to the studio,” said Saraceni, “and when we are in the studio, you had better call me Meister. Maestro is not quite right for these surroundings. And I shall call you Cornish, not Francis, when we are at work. Corniche. Yes, you shall be Corniche.”

  What was happening to the Meister? In the studio he was shorter, more darting and nervous in movement, and his nose seemed hookier than elsewhere. At work, Saraceni was not the urbane creature of his social life. Francis recalled what Uncle Tack had said about the Evil Eye, though of course he did not believe in any such thing.

  The studio was like a studio only in its fine north light, which came from a wall of windows that opened on the park. It had been, explained Saraceni as Francis gaped in wonderment, one of those amusements that pleased the aristocracy of the eighteenth century. It was a very long room the walls of which were encrusted with shells in many varieties, so set in the plaster that the inner sides of some and the convexities of others were outward toward the light, and they had been used to form an intricate decoration of panels, pillars, and baroque festoons. Not only shells, but minerals of several varieties had been used to decorate the walls, forming pilasters of white and pink and golden marble and—could it be?—lapis lazuli, between which depended clustered ropes of shells, each of which culminated at its fattest richness in a huge piece of brain coral. When it was new, and when it was loved and admired, it must have been a splendid folly, a rococo pavilion to lift the heart and sharpen the senses. But now the shells were dusty and dingy, the dry fountain in the wall showed rust and dirt in its basin, and the occasional mirrors were like eyes over which cataracts had grown. The shell benches had been shoved into a jumble at one end, and the room was dominated by several easels, a laboratory bench whose water supply came from visible, ugly piping that made a toe-catcher in the floor, and a large metal affair, suggesting a furnace, that had been hitched up to the castle’s meagre dynamo with equal disregard for the propriety of the room.

  “What love and skill must have gone into the making of this,” said Francis.

  “No doubt, but the less must give way to the greater, and now it is my workroom,” said Saraceni. “This was a costly, ingenious toy, and those who played in it are dust. Ours is the greater task.”

  What was the task? Francis was never told directly; he made his discoveries by deduction, with growing incredulity. From after breakfast until four o’clock in the afternoon, when the light changed too much for Saraceni’s needs, with a short interval for sandwiches and a glass of good Munich beer, he toiled at a variety of jobs from early September until mid-December. He learned to grind minerals to powder in a mortar, and mix them with various oils; the mixing was a tedious process. He learned to use and prepare mineral colours and gums—cinnabar, manganese dioxide, calcined umber, and sticky, messy gamboge. He learned to chip bits from the least visible parts of the splend
id lapis pilasters, and grind his chippings fine with mortar and pestle before uniting the powder with lilac oil, to make a splendid ultramarine. It gave him particular pleasure to make the acquaintance of woad, the isatis tinctoria, from the juice of which a dark blue could be extracted. At the laboratory bench he learned to make up a compound of carbolic acid and formaldehyde (the whiff of which reminded him poignantly of nights with Zadok in Devmney’s embalming parlour) and bottle it firmly against evaporation.

  “I don’t suppose you ever thought painting involved so much chemistry and cooking,” said Saraceni. “You are making the true colours used by the Old Masters, Corniche. These are the splendid shades that do not fade with age. Nowadays you can buy colours somewhat like them in shops, but they are not the same at all. They are labour-saving and they save time. But you and I have precisely the same amount of time as the Old Masters—twenty-four hours in every day. There is no more, and never any less. For the true work of restoration on an old panel or canvas you must use the colours the original master employed. The honesty of your craft demands it. It is also undetectable.

  “Oh, I suppose some very clever investigator with rays and chemicals might be able to say what parts of a picture had been restored—though I prefer to say revived—but our task is to do a job of revival that will not provoke foolishly inquisitive persons to resort to rays and chemicals. It is not the purpose of a picture to arouse unworthy suspicions, but to give pleasure—delight, or awe, or religious intimations, or simply a fine sense of the past, and of the boundless depth and variety of life.”

  This had a fine ring of morality and aesthetic probity about it. Saraceni making the past live again. But there were elements in what was really happening that Francis did not understand.

  If the past was to be recovered, why not the best of the past? There were pictures hanging in Schloss Düsterstein that plainly needed the attention of a restorer, pictures by distinguished masters—a Mengs, a van Bylert, even a Van Dyck that wanted cleaning—but these did not come to the shell-pavilion. Instead there were several pictures, usually painted on panels, some of which were in bad repair and all of which were dirty. One of Francis’s jobs was to wipe these as clean as possible with soft, damp cloths and then—but why?—wash these cloths in as little water as possible and dry out the pan until the dust from the picture was dust again, and could be sucked up with a syringe and put in a numbered small bottle.

  Most of the little pictures were portraits of Nobody in Particular, in all his and her dull variety; just noblemen and merchants, burgomasters and scholars, and their pie-faced wives. But Saraceni would place one of these competent, uninteresting daubs on his easel, and study it with care for hours before removing certain portions with a solvent so that the painting beneath was blurred, or else the undercoating of the panel was revealed. Then he would repaint the face, so that it was the same as before but with a greater distinction—a keenness of aristocratic eye, a new look of bürgerlich astuteness, a fuller beard; women, if they had hands, were given rings, modest but costly, and better complexions. Sometimes he placed, in the upper left-hand corner of the panel, some little heraldic device, which might indicate the status of the sitter, and on one picture, rather larger than the rest, he introduced an ornamental chain, the collar and emblem of the Saint-Esprit. He is tarting up these four-hundred-year-old dullards, thought Francis, but why, and for whom?

  Saraceni’s method of painting was wholly new to Francis. On his palette he laid out his colours—the colours that Francis had so laboriously prepared—in small, almost parsimonious dibbets; but elsewhere on the palette was some of the phenol and formaldehyde mixture mingled with a little oil, and before he took paint on his brush he dipped it first in this resinous gum, which served him as a medium. A strange way to paint, surely? Late in November Francis decided that the time had come to ask a question.

  “You shall see why I do that,” said the Meister. “Indeed, you cannot help but see. Overpainting on a restored—or revived—picture is easily detected with the naked eye. As a picture ages, and the paint dries out—it takes about fifty years—it cracks in a certain pattern. What we call the craquelure. The cracks are mere hair-lines; only a poor picture develops a hide like a crocodile. But those hair-lines penetrate right through all the coatings of paint, as deep as to the ground you have used to prepare your canvas—or panel—like these I have been working on. So—how do I produce a craquelure in the new work I have done that blends undetectably with the old work? Well, as you see I am using a fast-drying paint—or rather, that phenol mixture that I use as my medium. Tomorrow I shall show you how I produce the craquelure.”

  So this was what the electric furnace was for! Francis had assumed it might be to heat the cold, damp grotto-room, but such heat as there was came from a brazier—not much more than a pan of burning charcoal set on a tripod, which gave out about as much heat as a dying baby’s last breath, in Francis’s opinion. On the day following their talk about craquelure Saraceni turned on the electricity in the furnace, and in time, with much rumbling and moaning, it achieved a heat by no means great, but which taxed the primitive electrical system of the castle, where electric light was scant and dim, and did not proceed above the ground floor.

  When Saraceni declared the heat to be sufficient he and Francis carefully inserted the painted panels and after about fifty minutes of slow baking they emerged with, sure enough, tiny hairlines that satisfied the Meister. While they were still warm he surprised Francis yet again.

  “Before these cool, you must take a sable brush and put back as much as you can of the dust that was originally on these pictures, taking special pains to get it into the tiny cracks over the new work. Don’t be too eager; but be sure to cover the whole picture and especially whatever is new. Of course, you will use the dust from the bottle that bears the number of the picture. We must not insult Burgermeister A with dirt that the hand of time has sown on the portrait of the wife of Burgermeister B. And hurry up. The dust must adhere. Now—on with your work, you understudy of Father Time.”

  The next day Saraceni was in high excitement. “Everything now will have to wait until I return from Rome. I must visit my apartment before Christmas; I cannot be separated forever from my darlings, my pictures, my furniture—not even from my bed-curtains, which once belonged to the Empress Josephine. Antaeus had to touch his foot to the earth to gain strength, and I must touch and see my beauties if I am to have the resolution I need for this work.—You are looking at me oddly, Corniche? Does my passion for my collection really surprise you so much?”

  “No, Meister, not that. But—precisely what is it you are doing here?”

  “What do you suppose?”

  “I don’t want to be presumptuous, but this restoration, or revitalizing, or whatever you call it, seems to go a bit farther than is necessary.”

  “Oh, Corniche, speak what is in your mind. The word you want to use is faking, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t use that word to you, Meister.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “But it does look rather fishy.”

  “Fishy is just the right word! Now, Corniche, you shall know everything that is proper for you to know in good time. Indeed, you shall know a great deal when Prince Max visits us. He is coming for Christmas, and I shall be back in plenty of time to show him all these greatly improved panels. Prince Max talks a great deal more freely than I do. Of course, it is his right.

  “Meanwhile, during the fortnight that I am absent, you shall have a little treat. A treat and a rest. You have seen how I work, and I promised to teach you as much of what I know as you can take in. While I am away, I want you to paint a picture for me. See, here is this little panel. Almost a ruin as a picture, but the panel is sound enough, and so is the leather that covers it. Paint me a picture that is all your own, but would not look out of place among the other panels. Do the best you can.”

  “What is the subject to be? One of these bürgerlich turnip-heads?”

/>   “What you think best. Use your invention, my dear fellow. But make it congruous with the others. I want to see what you can do. And when I return we shall have a splendid Christmas, showing these pretty baked cakes to Prince Max.”

  Use his invention? Well, if that was what Saraceni wanted, that is what Francis would do, and he would surprise the Meister, who seemed to think his invention would be limited. Saraceni set off for Rome the day after he told Francis how to use his time, and Francis sat down to his table in the chilly shell-grotto to plan his surprise.

  Saraceni was not the only one to leave the castle. The Countess and Amalie left on the same day, to go to Munich to enjoy some of its pleasures before Christmas, and Francis and Miss Ruth Nibsmith were left in possession.

  Miss Nibsmith was by no means bad company; in the absence of the Countess she expanded considerably, and although Francis never saw her during the day, they met at dinner, which was served at the same stately pace as always. To fill up the time between courses they drank a good deal of the Countess’s excellent wine, and resorted after dinner to the brandy bottle.

  “I can never really settle myself in these German rooms,” said Miss Nibsmith, kicking off her substantial shoes and putting her feet on the side of the splendid porcelain stove in the family drawing-room. “They have no focus. You know what I mean? Focus, in the true Latin meaning of the word. No hearth. I long for an open fire. It is as good as a dog in a room to give it life. These German stoves are beautiful, and they are certainly practical. This room is warmer than it would be if it had a fireplace, but where does one look for the centre of the room? Where does one stand when making a pronouncement? Where does one warm one’s bottom?”

  “I suppose the focus is wherever the most important person is,” said Francis. “When the Countess is here, she is obviously the focus. Now—you ought to know these things, as an intimate of Düsterstein: I understand that for Christmas we are to entertain a Prince Max—will he be the focus? Or does the Countess always top the heap in her own castle?”