Apparently the pan was quite clean, for in a couple of minutes Hooper reappeared carrying a very spick and span pair of scales with a complete set of weights. When the scales had been placed on the table with the weights beside them, Mr. Broomhill took up the effigy with infinite care and lowered it gently on to the scale pan. Then, with the same care to avoid jars or shocks, he put on the weights, building up a little pile until the pan rose, when he made the final adjustment with a half-ounce weight.
“Three pounds, three and a half ounces,” said he. “Rather a lot for a small figure.”
“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed, “but Gannet used a dense material and was pretty liberal with it. I weighed some of his pottery at Kempster’s gallery and found it surprisingly heavy.”
He entered the weight of the effigy in his notebook, and, when the masterpiece had been replaced on its stand and the scales borne away to their abiding place, we resumed our tour of the room. Presently Hooper returned, bearing a large silver tray loaded with the materials for afternoon tea, which he placed on a small circular table.
“You needn’t wait, Hooper,” said our host. “We will help ourselves when we are ready.” As the footman retired, we turned to the last of the exhibits—a life-sized figure of a woman, naked, contorted and obese, whose brutal face and bloated limbs seemed to shout for thyroid extract—and having expatiated on its noble rendering of abstract form and its freedom from the sickly prettiness of “mere imitative sculpture,” our host dismissed the masterpieces and placed chairs for us by the table.
“Which museum is it,” he asked, as we sipped the excellent China tea, “that is showing Mr. Gannet’s work?”
“It is a small museum at Hoxton,” Thorndyke replied, “known as ‘The People’s Museum of Modern Art.’”
“Ah!” said Broomhill, “I know it; in fact, I occasionally lend some of my treasures for exhibition there. It is an excellent institution. It gives the poor people of that uncultured region an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the glories of modern art; the only chance they have.”
“There is the Geffrye Museum close by,” I reminded him.
“Yes,” he agreed, “but that is concerned with the obsolete furniture and art of the bad old times. It contains nothing of this sort,” he added, indicating his collection with a wave of the hand. Which was certainly true. Mercifully, it does not.
“And I hope,” he continued, “that you will be able to settle your question when you examine the figurine there. It doesn’t seem to me to matter very much, but you are a better judge of that than I am.”
When we had taken leave of our kind and courteous host and set forth on our homeward way we walked for a time in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts. As to Thorndyke’s ultimate purpose in this queer transaction, I could not make the vaguest guess and I gave it no consideration. But the experience, itself, had been an odd one with a peculiar interest of its own. Presently I opened the subject with a question.
“Could you make anything of this stuff of Broomhill’s or of his attitude to it?”
Thorndyke shook his head. “No,” he replied. “It is a mystery to me. Evidently Broomhill gets a positive pleasure from these things, and that pleasure seem to be directly proportionate to their badness; to the absence in them of all the ordinary qualities—fine workmanship, truth to nature, intellectual interest and beauty—which have hitherto been considered to be the essentials of works of art. It seems to be a cult, a fashion, associated with a certain state of mind; but what that state of mind is, I cannot imagine. Obviously it has no connection with what has always been known as art, unless it is a negative connection. You noticed that Broomhill was utterly contemptuous of the great work of the past, and that, I think, is the usual modernist attitude. But what can be the state of mind of a man who is completely insensitive to the works of the accomplished masters of the older schools, and full of enthusiasm for clumsy imitations of the works of savages or ungifted children, I cannot begin to understand.”
“No,” said I, “that is precisely my position,” and with this the subject dropped.
CHAPTER 16
At the Museum
“It is curious to reflect,” Thorndyke remarked, as we took our way eastward along Old Street, “that this, which is commonly accounted one of the meanest and most squalid regions of the town, should be, in a sense, the last outpost of a disappearing culture.”
“To what culture are your referring?” I asked.
“To that of the industrial arts,” he replied, “of which we may say that it is substantially the foundation of all artistic culture. Nearly everywhere else those arts are dead or dying, killed by machinery and mass production, but here we find little groups of surviving craftsmen who still keep the lamp burning. To our right in Curtain Road and various small streets adjoining, are skilled cabinet makers, making chairs and other furniture in the obsolete tradition of what Broomhill would call the bad old times of Chippendale and his contemporaries; near by in Bunhill Row the last of the makers of fine picture frames have their workshops, and farther ahead in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields a remnant of the ancient colony of silk weavers is working with the hand-loom as was done in the eighteenth century.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “it seems rather an anomaly; and our present mission seems to rub in the discrepancy. I wonder what inspired the founders of The People’s Museum of Modern Art to dump it down in this neighbourhood and almost in sight of the Geffrye Museum?”
Thorndyke chuckled softly. “The two museums,” said he, “are queer neighbours; the one treasuring the best work of the past and the other advertising the worst work of the present. But perhaps we shan’t find it as bad as we expect.”
I don’t know what Thorndyke expected, but it was bad enough for me. We located it without difficulty by means of a painted board inscribed with its name and description set over what looked like a reconstructed shop front, to which had been added a pair of massive folding doors. But those doors were closed and presumably locked, for a large card affixed to the panel with drawing pins bore the announcement, “Closed temporarily. Re-open 11:15.”
Thorndyke looked at his watch. “We have a quarter of an hour to wait,” said he, “but we need not wait here. We may as well take a stroll and inspect the neighbourhood. It is not beautiful, but it has a character of its own which is worth examining.”
Accordingly, we set forth on a tour of exploration through the narrow streets where Thorndyke expounded the various objects of interest in illustration of his previous observations. In one street we found a row of cabinet makers’ shops, through the windows of which we could see the half-finished carcases of wardrobes and sideboards and “period” chairs, seatless and unpolished; and I noticed that the names above the shops were mostly Jewish and many of them foreign. Then, towards Shoreditch, we observed a timber yard with a noble plank of Spanish mahogany at the entrance, and noted that the stock inside seemed to consist mainly of hardwoods suitable for making furniture. But there was no time to make a detailed examination for the clock of a neighbouring church now struck the quarter and sent us hurrying back to the temple of modernism, where we found that the card had vanished and the doors stood wide open, revealing a lobby and an inner door.
As we opened the latter and entered the gallery we were met by an elderly, tired-looking man who regarded us expectantly.
“Are you Mr. Sancroft?” Thorndyke asked.
“Ah!” said our friend, “then I was right. You will be Dr. Thorndyke. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”
“Only a matter of minutes,” Thorndyke replied, in his suavest manner, “and we spent those quite agreeably.”
“I am so very sorry,” said Sancroft, with evidently genuine concern, “but it was unavoidable. I had to go out, and as I am all alone here, I had to lock up the place while I was away. It is very awkward having no one to leave in charge.”
“It must be,” Thorndyke agreed, sympathetically. “Do you mean that you have no assistant
of any kind, not even a doorkeeper?”
“No one at all,” replied Sancroft. “You see, the society which runs this museum has no funds but the members’ contributions. There’s only just enough to keep the place going, without paying any salaries. I am a voluntary worker, but I have my living to earn. Mostly I can do my work in the curator’s room—I am a law writer—but there are times when I have to go out on business, and then—well, you saw what happened this morning.”
Thorndyke listened to this tale of woe, not only with patience but with a concern that rather surprised me.
“But,” said he, “can’t you get some of your friends to give you at least a little help? Even a few hours a day would solve your difficulties.”
Mr. Sancroft shook his head wearily. “No,” he replied, “it is a dull job, minding a small gallery, especially as so few visitors come to it, and I have found nobody who is willing to take it on. I suppose,” he added, with a sad smile, “you don’t happen to know of any enthusiast in modern art who would make the sacrifice in the interests of popular enlightenment and culture?”
“At the moment,” said Thorndyke, “I can think of nobody but Mr. Broomhill, and I don’t suppose he could spare the time. Still, I will bear your difficulties in mind, and if I should think of any person who might be willing to help, I will try my powers of persuasion on him.”
I must confess that this reply rather astonished me. Thorndyke was a kindly man, but he was a busy man and hardly in a position to enter into Mr. Sancroft’s difficulties. And with him a promise was a promise, not a mere pleasant form of words; a fact which I think Sancroft hardly realized for his expression of thanks seemed to imply gratitude for a benevolent intention rather than any expectation of actual performance.
“It is very kind of you to wish to help me,” said he. “And now, as to your own business. I understand that you want to make some sort of inspection of the works of Mr. Gannet. Does that involve taking them out of the case?”
“If that is permissible,” Thorndyke replied. “I wanted, among other matters, to feel the weight of them.”
“There is no objection to your taking them out,” said Sancroft, “for a definite purpose. I will unlock the case and put the things in your custody for the time being. And then I will ask you to excuse me. I have a lease to engross, and I want to get on with it as quickly as I can.”
With this he led us to the glass case in which Gannet’s atrocities were exposed to view, and having unlocked it, made us a little bow and retired into his lair.
“That lease,” Thorndyke remarked, “is a stroke of luck for us. Now we can discuss the matter freely.”
He reached into the case and lifting out the effigy, began to examine it in the closest detail, especially as to the upturned base.
“The questions, as I understand them,” said I, “are, first, priority, and second, method of work; whether it was fired solid, or excavated, or squeezed in a mould. The priority seems to be settled by the signature. This is 571 A. Then it must have been the first piece made.”
“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed, “I think we may accept that. What do you say as to the method?”
“That, also, seems to be settled by the character of the base. It is a solid base without any opening, which appears to me to prove that the figure was fired solid.”
“A reasonable inference,” said Thorndyke, “from the particular fact. But if you look at the sides, you will notice on each a linear mark which suggests that a seam or join had been scraped off. You probably observed similar marks on Broomhill’s copy, which were evidently the remains of the seam from the mould. But the question of solidity will be best determined by the weight. Let us try that.”
He produced from his pocket a portable spring balance and a piece of string. In the latter he made two “running bowlines,” and, hitching them over the figure near its middle, hooked the “bight” of the string on to the balance. As he held up the latter, I read off from the index, “Three pounds, nine and a half ounces. If I remember rightly, Broomhill’s image weighed three pounds, three and a half ounces, so this one is six ounces heavier. That seems to support the view that this figure was fired in the solid.”
“I don’t think it does, Jervis,” said he. “Broomhill’s copy was undoubtedly a pressing with a considerable cavity and not very thick walls. I should say that the solid figure would be at least twice the weight of the pressing.”
A moment’s reflection showed me that he was right. Six ounces obviously could not account for the difference between a hollow and a solid figure.
“Then,” said I, “it must have been excavated. That would probably just account for the difference in weight.”
“Yes,” Thorndyke agreed, but a little doubtfully, “so far as the weight is concerned, that is quite sound. But there are these marks, which certainly look like the traces of a seam which has been scraped down. What do you say to them?”
“I should say that they are traces of the excavating process. It would be necessary to cut the figure in halves in order to hollow out the interior. I say that these marks are the traces of the join where the two halves were put together.”
“The objection to that,” said he, “is that the figure would not have been cut in halves. When a clay work, such as a terra-cotta bust, is hollowed out, the usual practice is to cut off the back in as thin a slice as possible, excavate the main mass of the bust, and when it is as hollow as is safe, to stick the back on with slip and work over the joins until they are invisible. And that is the obvious and reasonable way in which to do it. But these marks are in the middle, just where the seams would be in a pressing, and in the same position as those in Broomhill’s copy. So that, in spite of the extra weight, I am disposed to think that this figure is really a pressing, like Broomhill’s. And that is, on other grounds, the obvious probability. A mould was certainly made, and it must have been made from the solid figure. But it would have been much more troublesome to excavate the solid model than to make a squeeze from the mould.”
As he spoke, he tapped the figure lightly with his knuckle as it hung from the balance, but the dull sound that he elicited gave no information either way, beyond proving—which we knew already from the weight—that the walls of the shell were thick and clumsy. Then he took off the string, and having offered the image to me for further examination (which I declined), he put it back in the case. Then we went into the curator’s room to let Mr. Sancroft know that we had finished our inspection, and to thank him for having given us the facilities for making it.
“Well,” said he, laying aside his pen, “I suppose that now you know all about Peter Gannet’s works, which is more than I do. They are rather over the heads of most of our visitors, and mine, too.”
“They are not very popular, then,” Thorndyke ventured.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Sancroft replied with a faint smile. “The monkey figure seems to afford a good deal of amusement. But that is not quite what we are out for. Our society seeks to instruct and elevate, not to give a comic entertainment. I shan’t be sorry when the owner of that figure fetches it away.”
“The owner?” Thorndyke repeated. “You mean Mrs. Gannet?”
“No,” replied Sancroft, “it doesn’t belong to her. Gannet sold it, but as the purchaser was making a trip to America he got permission to lend it to us until such time as the owner should return and claim it. I am expecting him at any time now; and as I said, I shall be glad when he does come, for the thing is making the gallery a laughing stock among the regular visitors. They are not advanced enough for the really extreme modernist sculpture.”
“And suppose the owner never does turn up?” Thorndyke asked.
“Then I suppose we should hand it back to Mrs. Gannet. But I don’t anticipate any difficulty of that sort. The purchaser—a Mr. Newman, I think—gave fifty pounds for it, so he is not likely to forget to call for it.”
“No, indeed,” Thorndyke agreed. “It is an enormous price. Did Gannet himself tell yo
u what he sold it for?”
“Not Gannet. I never met him. It was Mrs. Gannet who told me when she brought it with the pottery.”
“I suppose,” said Thorndyke, “that the owner, when he comes to claim his property, will produce some evidence of his identity? You would hardly hand over a valuable piece such as this seems to be, to anyone who might come and demand it, unless you happen to know him by sight?”
“I don’t,” replied Sancroft. “I’ve never seen the man. But the question of identity is provided for. Mrs. Gannet left a couple of letters with me from her husband which will make the transaction quite safe. Would you like to see them? I know you are interested in Mrs. Gannet’s affairs.”
Without waiting for a reply, he unlocked and pulled out a drawer in the writing table, and having turned over a number of papers, took out two letters pinned together.
“Here they are,” said he, handing them to Thorndyke, who spread them out so that we could both read them. The contents of the first one were as follows:
“12, Jacob Street.
“April 13th, 1931.
“Dear Mr. Sancroft,
“In addition to the collection of pottery, for exhibition on loan, I am sending you a stoneware figurine of a monkey. This is no longer my property as I have sold it to a Mr. James Newman. But as he is making a business trip to the United States, he has given me permission to deposit it on loan with you until he returns to England; this he expects to do in about three months’ time. He will then call on you and present the letter of introduction of which I attach a copy; and you will then deliver the figurine to him and take a receipt from him which I will ask you kindly to send on to me.
“Yours sincerely.
“Peter Gannet.”
The second letter was the copy referred to, and read thus:
“Dear Mr. Sancroft,
“The bearer of this, Mr. James Newman, is the owner of the figurine of a monkey which I deposited on loan with you. Will you kindly deliver it to him, if he wants to have possession of it, or take his instructions as to its disposal? If he wishes to take it away with him, please secure a receipt for it before handing it over to him.
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