‘Yes, sir. A lovely thing, sir. I bought it the other day locally from a private collection. Been in the family for years.’
Mr. Darby was too astute to mention Romney. To stress the name, suggest that it was well-known, might put the old man on his guard. Suddenly the shop-bell tinkled, the shop door opened, sending a thrill like a bullet through Mr. Darby. The collectors were already on the track. Mr. Darby was wonderful. In that moment of appalling national peril he did not for a moment abandon his sang-froid. ‘I might as well have it,’ he said, externally bored, internally in an agony of trepidation, and in a moment had a five pound note out of his pocket and slapped into the old man’s hand.
The old man began pottering among his specimens. ‘I’ll have it packed up at once, sir,’ he said.
Packed up, indeed, when every second was valuable. Mr. Darby swept the suggestion aside. ‘Don’t trouble,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it as it is.’ Yes, if it weighed a ton he would, somehow or other, take it as it was. But, thank God, the old man lifted it easily from its place, and Mr. Darby, laying hold of it, found that the only drawback about it was its size. In a moment he was steering it carefully towards the door. Unceremoniously and with an indignant glare of his spectacles he pushed past the waiting customer, a tall, gaunt, cleanshaven, suspiciously American-looking person. Another moment and the old man had closed the door behind Mr. Darby and Romney and they found themselves in the street.
Tenderly Mr. Darby rested the edge of the picture on the ground and gazed wildly about him. The world was a mere blur through his steaming spectacles. A vague shape, making a noise like a motor-car, glided towards him down the street. He hailed it in desperation: by the mercy of Providence it was an empty taxi, and a few seconds later he was safely installed in it, holding the picture in front of him like a shield. ‘To the Balmoral Hotel, Northumberland Avenue, Trafalgar Square! ’ he shouted. The door slammed, the taxi started, and Mr. Darby fell back against the cushions, took off his hat and his spectacles, took out his handkerchief, and with a sigh of profound relief mopped his streaming brow and face. A priceless art-treasure had been saved for the nation. Then he slowly and carefully began to polish his spectacles. He had forgotten all about our great national architect Sir Christopher Wren.
• • • • • • • •
This important purchase was the first of many. Mr. Darby, fired by his first success, became a mighty picture hunter. But he did not allow himself to be intoxicated by that first triumph: he equipped himself properly for his task. Not only did he add to his knowledge of the British School by reading many works on the subject; he went further still. Again and again he returned to the National, the Tate, the Wallace Collection, studying and observing in the light of what he had read, till soon he was able without a moment’s hesitation to distinguish easily between a Reynolds and a Gainsborough, a Turner and a Constable, a Romney and a Raeburn, to say nothing of the smaller fry among our old masters. Armed with all this highly technical knowledge he began to haunt the windows of antique-shops. He was far too acute a man to waste his time in the rooms of the great London picture dealers: he even avoided the better-class antique-shops. It was the humble, dusty, promiscuous shops that he frequented, shops hidden in the meaner streets or tucked away in the suburbs, shops in which one was as likely to find a row of grimy books, a second-hand sewing-machine or a stray commode, as the prizes that he sought. Richmond, Putney, Camberwell, Streatham, Highbury Barn, he searched them all and many places more, and he was not unrewarded. The further his investigations went, the greater grew his amazed indignation at the culpable neglect of the National Gallery authorities. So far from there being a shortage of British old masters, the whole place teemed with them. He spent his days in a fever of industrious enthusiasm. Within a fortnight he had become the owner of two Reynoldses, a Gainsborough, an immense Turner (‘As regards colour,’ Mr. Darby said of it, ‘the finest of his pictures I know.’), four large Landseers, and (descending to more recent times) five small works by the late Alma Tadema. The whole lot had cost him the trifling sum of fifty one pounds five shillings. ‘It only shows,’ Mr. Darby remarked to Miss Clatworthy, ‘what a man can do with a pair of eyes, a knowledge of art, and a little spare time.’ The question how to house them soon grew imperative. It was all very well to stack half a dozen in his bedroom, but already there were too many for that. Besides, he didn’t want to stack them: he wanted to hang them upon walls, to see them and enjoy them. When he had amassed a considerable collection he proposed, of course, to present them to the nation, to the National Gallery, with the proviso that they should be hung in place of the foreign pictures at present there. But meanwhile, why not have the enjoyment of them? He resolved to take a furnished house.
His requirements being so particular, it was some time before Mr. Darby found a place to suit him. For himself he could have put up with a modest flat, but a room big enough to play the part of a picture gallery was imperative. At last he found a furnished house in Bedford Square with just the room he required. It was a large, long ball-room on the ground floor, the very room to house the Darby Collection. It had another advantage: the domestic staff, including a man and wife, he the butler, she the cook, was available. The owners were going to South Africa for a year. As they stepped out, Mr. Darby stepped in, and soon, under his personal supervision, the Darby Collection was handsomely framed and suitably hung. It amounted now to over twenty pictures. Mr. Darby, recollecting the seating accommodation in the National Gallery, hired four settees and set them in pairs back to back down the centre of the room, a happy touch which turned the room into an unmistakable gallery. Each picture was properly labelled, under the name of each painter was his date, and on the lintel of the double doors which opened into the room was painted in bold gilt capitals: THE PICTURE GALLERY. And often, when he had been dining alone, Mr. Darby would proceed after dinner to the gallery, switch on, with an opulent hand, a flood of light and warmth, and pace up and down; pausing from time to time, with hands in pockets and cigar in mouth, to contemplate with profound aesthetic satisfaction one or other national masterpiece. The masterpieces, unperturbed and vague, gazed back at Mr. Darby, much less impressed by him, it seemed, than he by them. For to him they were at this time more, much more, than mere pictures. These flat, shadowy personages, animals, scenes, provided his life with an aim, a gusto, a focus which it would otherwise have lacked. They were helping him triumphantly over a difficult period. For the bare fact of being a millionaire and the task of amassing knowledge and culture were not always, for one of Mr. Darby’s temperament, enough to compensate for human relationships. He was almost friendless in London: if it had not been for Princep, his Bedford Square butler, whose austerity he gradually beguiled into conversation, he would have been completely so. Since leaving the Balmoral he had lost sight of Miss Clatworthy; but, as companionship, Miss Clatworthy’s vague, wistful virginity had soon proved to be very meagre fare. After a week or two she had, as it were, simply evaporated, deteriorating as she faded, like an inexpensive and too sweet perfume. It was not only her art that was miniature.
So it was that from time to time Mr. Darby found himself nowadays in the presence of a grim spectre which, try as he would, he could not exorcize, the spectre of loneliness and aimlessness. He had discovered how terribly lonely a man may be among millions of other men. Was his new power and freedom leading him only to a cruel deception? Generally he averted his eyes when he caught sight of the spectre at his elbow, but sometimes he dared for a moment or two to face it, and then he admitted to himself that he longed for the old, easy, comfortable companionships from which he had rashly fled. He longed for Sarah, for the Stedmans and the Cribbs, for Mr. Marston and McNab and Pellow and Miss Suninngdale and his other friends, for the old routine whose ordered ebb and flow relieved him of the difficult problem of organizing his life into some sort of meaning and coherence. When these moods of depression were upon him, the huge empty mornings and afternoons, once filled by the pleasant
activities of office-work, appeared to him as terrifying deserts in which he was hopelessly lost. But when the spectre, grown overbold, urged him to give it all up and return to Savershill, as Sarah had done, Mr. Darby’s courage always reasserted itself. He lifted his head, pursed his lips, and threw out his chest. No, he would never stoop to that. And in this mood of self-assertion he was able to recall what in his fits of dejection he kept forgetting, that these happy memories were only one face of the old life. He conjured up the reverse, the black depression, that sense of spiritual bankruptcy which had so overpoweringly settled down upon him between the dates of his birthday party and of the news of Uncle Tom Darby’s bequest. These horrible memories effectually laid the ghost which haunted him now. He knew it for what it was, a deceiving demon mischievously bent on luring him back into the old captivity. And so, when Mr. Darby detected it lurking beside his chair in the evening— for, like other ghosts, it was generally in the evening that it put in an appearance—he gradually accustomed himself to face it and stare it out of countenance. Then, rising with dignity from his chair, he proceeded to the Picture Gallery, and with a snap of the switches conjured out of nonentity the Darby Collection, that living symbol of his new duties and enthusiasms. In its presence the spectre faded, the old zest returned, and he awoke next morning, happy and vigorous once more, sang in his bath, and set off, aglow with the fires of patriotism, to ransack yet another suburb for lost masterpieces.
Chapter XVI
Mr. Darby Enters Public Life
Mr. Darby, after an active morning in Muswell Hill where he had bagged an Old Crome (somewhat faded and battered, ‘but that,’ as he pertinently remarked, ‘goes to prove its age,’) and another work labelled ‘Highland Cattle, after Peter Graham, nice frame, 10/6,’had lunched with relish at home; and having enjoyed an after-lunch cigar and a short after-lunch nap, had driven westward to regard the Marble Arch in the light of the newly acquired knowledge that the notorious Tyburn Tree had formerly stood there. Having dismissed his taxi and surveyed the scene at leisure with the emotions evoked by its historic associations, he decided, as the day was fine and warm, to take a walk. Accordingly he entered the Park and struck south-west at an easy saunter, idly swinging his umbrella and humming a favourite tune. ‘For I’m going far away,’ he trolled, ‘At the breaking of the day,’ and the sparrows that pecked on the gravel, warned by this announcement, flew off to the grass on either side of the walk and left him an unencumbered passage. But hardly had Mr. Darby entered upon his second verse when he checked the vocal flow and restricted his deportment to something less flamboyant. He had seen a figure approaching him down the long path. He paid no further attention to the person advancing upon him and his thoughts reverted to the pictures he had bought that morning. He had his doubts, now, about the Peter Graham: it was hardly, perhaps, up to the standard of the Darby Collection.
He was startled out of his reflections by a voice beside him, so startled that he actually skipped to one side before halting and turning to the speaker. ‘Why, how do you do, Mr. Darby?’ the voice had said, and Mr. Darby, when he had recovered his composure, found himself looking up into the long, bony, grey-moustached face of Lord Savershill.
‘You may not remember,’ said Lord Savershill, ‘that we met in the train some weeks ago.’
‘I remember it very well indeed, my lord,’ said Mr. Darby. ‘Most kind of you to … ah …’
‘I’ve been trying to get on your tracks ever since,’ said Lord Savershill. ‘To be quite candid, you gave me to understand that you are a rich man, and I’m after your money. The days of the highwayman are not yet past, you see.’
Mr. Darby beamed through his spectacles. ‘I don’t see your … ah … blunderbuss, my lord.’
Lord Savershill smiled. ‘I use persuasion when possible,’ he said. ‘The fact is, I very much want to entangle you in the Hospital Co-ordination Society. It does a useful and much-needed work in improving the efficiency of our hospitals, and if you will give me a chance of explaining its activities I feel sure you will be interested. We want rich and active supporters. Now when can I get at you? Perhaps you will dine with me at my club to-morrow or Friday?’
Mr. Darby declared himself delighted and accepted for the morrow.
‘That’s very kind of you. Let us say eight o’clock tomorrow, then, at the Brunswick. Now I must hurry on. I have a meeting in Welbeck Street in ten minutes.’ He waved his hand and left Mr. Darby pleased, flattered, and, though a little apprehensive of his engagement to-morrow, much heartened by this human intrusion into his solitary existence. He continued his stroll, his spirits higher than ever, paused to inspect the flower-beds, paused again to watch the ducks in the Serpentine, and then, wheeling eastwards, emerged from the Park at Hyde Park Corner. It was too fine a day to shut himself up in a taxi, and feeling in a free, unconventional mood, he resolved to lay aside his dignity and, millionaire though he was, travel home on the top of a bus. A 19 bus would deposit him at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, close to the house in Bedford Square.
On the top of the bus doubts began to assail him, absurd little fears, trivial yet insistent. Where was the Brunswick Club? But surely any taxi-driver would know it. But how did he find Lord Savershill when he got there? Did one just walk in and search about? That would be rather an embarrassing business. Or did one enquire somewhere? And what ought he to wear? Perhaps Princep would be able to help him.
At dinner that evening, as he sat, a small solitary figure at the head of the large dining-table with Princep hovering noiselessly about him, he consulted Princep. ‘Ah … Princep, you must advise me. In the first place, where’s the Brunswick Club?’
‘The Brunswick, sir? In Pall Mall, sir.’
‘I’m dining there to-morrow night. Do you think I ought to put on dress-clothes?’
Princep hesitated. ‘Well, probably, sir. It rather depends, if you’ll excuse my saying so, on the sort of gentleman … er …!’
Mr. Darby glanced up. ‘A lord!’ he said, ‘Lord … ah … Savershill.’
‘Then you should dress, sir. Are you dining with him alone, sir?’
‘I … ah … fancy so,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘in fact, I feel sure of it.’
‘Then a black tie will be sufficient, sir.’
‘And a tail coat?’ Mr. Darby suggested.
‘No, sir. A tail coat is never worn with a black tie.’
‘Never, Princep?’
‘Never, sir. That is, not by gentlemen.’
‘And tell me, Princep,’—Mr. Darby gazing earnestly up, at Princep, looked like a talkative schoolboy questioning a grave uncle—‘how do I find Lord Savershill when I get to the Brunswick?’
‘Simply give your name to the hall porter, sir, and ask for his Lordship.’
An invaluable fellow, Princep. Mr. Darby resolved that when he left Bedford Square he must have a man of his own as like Princep as possible; and he repeated the resolve as he sat, after dinner at the Brunswick on the following evening, sipping a liqueur brandy and listening to Lord Savershill expounding the aims, objects and achievements of the Hospital Co-ordination Society; for everything that Princep had advised had turned out to be exactly right.
In the vaguely blissful state induced by a good dinner and a comfortable armchair Mr. Darby found it impossible to follow all that Lord Savershill was telling him of the Hospital Co-ordination Society,—the H.C.S. as he called it. But he was well aware that this was not Lord Savershill’s fault, for though unable to follow the drift of all this detailed exposition, Mr. Darby was none the less able to appreciate the fact that it was admirably lucid. ‘This is most important,’ he thought to himself. ‘If only I could listen to it, I should undoubtedly understand every word of it,’ As it was, his mind did no more than pick up passing phrases. ‘Co-operation between managers of voluntary and rate-supported hospitals,’ ‘uniform system of accounts,’ ‘prevention of overlapping,’ ‘improved administration,’ ‘universal standard of efficiency,’—phrases such as
these rose like bubbles from the flood of sound that swept in at Mr. Darby’s right ear and out again at his left, swelled and gleamed brightly for a moment in his intelligence, and burst at the impact of the next. But it would be a mistake to suppose that Mr. Darby, though he did not, strictly speaking, understand, was not impressed. He was immensely impressed. Lord Savershill’s obvious enthusiasm infected him. He felt very strongly that the H.C.S., whatever its aims and objects might be, was a society that called for whole-hearted support. ‘We idle rich, my dear Mr. Darby, have very serious responsibilities nowadays.’ The words floated up into Mr. Darby’s understanding with challenging distinctness. His attention, which had been flitting and perching, like a tame canary, about the lofty, green-pillared room in which they sat, was arrested. ‘The work,’ Lord Savershill went on, ‘enables my wife and me to feel ourselves useful members of society. She acts as Secretary for the northern division, and I am chairman of the Society.’
The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife Page 18
