Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “I see.”

  Nothing further was said about the new book-keeper. His lordship went into the back parlour and played the piano until satiated; then mixed himself a lime julep.

  That afternoon they went over the reports of the experts very carefully. From these reports and his own conclusions Quarren drafted a catalogue while Dankmere went about sticking adhesive labels on the frames, all numbered. And, as he trotted blithely about his work, he talked to himself and to the pictures:

  “Here’s number nine for you, old lady! If I’d had a face like that I’d have killed the artist who transferred it to canvas!... Number sixteen for you there in your armour! Somebody in Springfield will buy you for an ancestor and that’s what will happen to you.... And you, too, in a bag-wig! — you’ll be some rich Yankee’s ancestor before you know it! That’s the way you’ll end, my smirking friend.... Hello! Tiens! In Gottes namen — whom have we here? Why, it’s Venus!... And hot weather is no excuse for going about that way!... Listen to this, Quarren, for an impromptu patter-song —

  “‘Venus, dear, you ought to know What the proper caper is — Even Eve, who wasn’t slow, Robbed the neighbours’ graperies! Even Mænads on the go, Fat Bacchantes in a row — Even ladies in a show Wear some threads of naperies! Through the heavens planet-strewn Where a shred of vapour is Quickly clothes herself the Moon! Get you to a modiste soon Where the tissue-paper is, Cut in fashions fit for June — Wear ‘em, dear, for draperies — —’”

  “Good heavens!” protested Quarren— “how long can you run on like that?”

  “Years and years, my dear fellow. It’s in me — born in me! Can you beat it? Though I appear to be a peer appearance is a liar; cast for a part apart from caste, departing I climb higher toward the boards to bore the hordes and lord it, sock and buskin dispensing sweetness, art, and light as per our old friend Ruskin — —”

  “Dankmere!”

  “Heaven-born?”

  “Stop!”

  “I remain put.... What number do I stick on this gentleman with streaky features?”

  “Eighteen. That’s a Franz Hals.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes; the records are all here, and the experts agree.”

  His lordship got down nimbly from the step-ladder and came over to the desk:

  “Young sir,” he said, “how much is that picture worth?”

  “All we can get for it. It’s not a very good example.”

  “Are you going to tell people that?”

  “If they ask me,” said Quarren, smiling.

  “What price are you going to put on it?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “And do you think any art-smitten ass will pay that sum for a thing like that?”

  “I think so. If it were only a decent example I’d ask ten times that — and probably get it in the end.”

  Dankmere inspected the picture more respectfully for a few moments, then pasted a label on an exquisite head by Greuze.

  “She’s a peach,” he said. “What price is going to waft her from my roof-tree?”

  “The experts say it’s not a Greuze but a contemporary copy. And there’s no pedigree, either.”

  “Oh,” said the Earl blankly, “is that your opinion, too?”

  “I haven’t any yet. But there’s no such picture by Greuze extant.”

  “You don’t think it a copy?”

  “I’m inclined not to. Under that thick blackish-yellow varnish I believe I’ll find the pearl and rose texture of old Greuze himself. In the meantime it’s not for sale.”

  “I see. And this battle-scene?”

  “Wouverman’s — ruined by restoring. It’s not worth much.”

  “And this Virgin?”

  “Pure as the Virgin Herself — not a mark — flawless. It’s by ‘The Master of the Death of Mary.’ Isn’t it a beauty? Do you notice St. John holding the three cherries and the Christ-child caressing the goldfinch? Did you ever see such colour?”

  “It’s — er — pretty,” said his lordship.

  And so during the entire afternoon they compiled the price-list and catalogue, marking copies for what they were, noting such pictures as had been ruined by restoring or repainted so completely as to almost obliterate the last original brush stroke. Also Quarren reserved for his own investigations such canvases as he doubted or of which he had hopes — a number that under their crocked, battered, darkened or discoloured surfaces hinted of by-gone glories that might still be living and only imprisoned beneath the thick opacity of dust, soot, varnish, and the repainting of many years ago.

  And that night he went to bed happier than he had ever been in all his life — unless his moments with Strelsa Leeds might be termed happy ones.

  Monday morning brought, among other things, a cloudless sun, and little Miss Vining quite as spotless and radiant; and within ten minutes the click of the typewriter made the silent picture-plastered rooms almost gay.

  In shirtwaist and cuffs she took her place behind the desk with a sort of silent decision which seemed at once to invest her with suzerainty over all that corner of the room; and Dankmere coming in a little later, whistling merrily and twirling his walking-stick, sheered off instinctively on his breezy progress through the rooms, skirting Jessie Vining’s domain as though her private ensign flew above it and earthworks, cannon and trespass notices flanked her corner on every side.

  In the back parlour he said to Quarren: “So that is the girl?”

  “It sure is.”

  “God bless my soul! she acts as though she had just bought in the whole place.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Just sitting there,” admitted Dankmere.

  He seemed to have lost his spirits. Once, certain that he was unobserved except by Quarren, he ventured to balance his stick on his chin, but it was a half-hearted performance; and when he tossed up his straw hat and attempted to catch it on his head, he missed, and the corrugated brim sustained a dent.

  A number of people called that morning, quiet, well-dressed, cautious-eyed, soft-spoken gentlemen who moved about noiselessly over the carpets and, on encountering one another, nodded with silent familiarity and smiles scarcely perceptible.

  They seemed to require no information concerning the pictures which they swept with glances almost careless on their first rounds of the rooms. But the first leisurely tour always resulted in a second where one or two pictures seemed to claim their closer scrutiny.

  Now and then one of these gentlemen would screw a jeweller’s glass into his eye and remain a few minutes nose almost touching a canvas. Several used the large reading-glass lying on a side table. Before they departed all glanced over the incomplete scale of prices which Jessie Vining had typed and bound in blue covers; but one and all took their leave in amiable silence, saying a non-committal word or two to Quarren in pleasantly modulated voices and passing Jessie’s desk with a grave inclination of gravely preoccupied faces.

  When the last leisurely lingerer had taken his leave Quarren said to Jessie Vining:

  “Those are representatives of various first-class dealers — confidential buyers, sons — even dealers themselves — like that handsome gray-haired young-looking man who is Max Von Ebers, head of that great house.”

  “But they didn’t buy one single thing!” said Jessie.

  Quarren laughed: “People don’t buy off-hand. Our triumph is to get them here at all. I wrote to each of them personally.”

  Nobody else came for a long while; then one or two of the lesser dealers appeared, and now and then a man who might be an agent or a prowling and wealthy amateur or perhaps one of those curious haunters of all art marts who never buy but who never miss assisting at all inaugurations in person — like an ubiquitous and silent dog who turns up wherever more than two people assemble with any purpose in view — or without any.

  During the forenoon and early afternoon several women came into the galleries; and they seemed to be a little different from ordinary women,
although it would be hard to say wherein they were different except in one instance — a tall, darkly handsome girl whose jewellery was as conspicuously oriental as her brilliant colour.

  Later Quarren told Jessie Vining that they were expert buyers on commission or brokers having clients among those very wealthy people who bought pictures now and then because it was fashionable to do so. Also, these same women-brokers represented a number of those unhappy old families who, incognito, were being forced by straitened circumstances to part secretly with heirlooms — family plate, portraits, miniatures, furniture — even with the antique mirrors on the walls and the very fire-dogs on the hearth amid the ashes of a burnt-out race almost extinct.

  A few Jews came — representing the extreme types of the most wonderful race of people in the world — one tall, handsome, immaculate young man whose cultivated accent, charming manners, and quiet bearing challenged exception — and one or two representing the other extreme, loud, restless, aggressive, and as impertinent as they dared be, discussing the canvases in noisy voices and with callous manners verging always on the offensive.

  These evinced a disposition for cash deals and bargain-wrangling, discouraged good-naturedly by Quarren who referred them to the catalogue; and presently they took themselves off.

  Dankmere sidled up to Quarren rather timidly toward the close of the afternoon.

  “I don’t see what bally good I am in this business,” he said. “I don’t mean to shirk, Quarren, but there doesn’t seem to be anything for me to do. I think that all these beggars spot me for an ignoramus the moment they lay eyes on me, and the whole thing falls on you.”

  Quarren said laughingly: “Well, didn’t you furnish the stock?”

  “We ought to go halves,” muttered Dankmere, shyly skirting Jessie Vining’s domain where she was writing letters with the Social Register at her elbow.

  The last days of June and the first of July were repetitions in a measure of the opening day at the Dankmere Galleries; people came and were received and entertained by Quarren; Dankmere sat about in various chairs or retired furtively to the backyard to smoke at intervals; Jessie Vining with more colour in her pale, oval face, ruled her corner of the room in a sort of sweet and silent dignity.

  Dankmere, who, innately, possessed the effrontery of a born comedian, for some reason utterly unknown to himself, was inclined to be afraid of her — afraid of the clear brown eyes indifferently lifted to his when he entered — afraid of the quiet “Good-morning, Lord Dankmere,” with which she responded to his morning greeting — afraid of her cool skilful little hands busy with pencil, pen, or lettered key — afraid of everything about her from her rippling brown hair and snowy collar to the tips of her little tan shoes — even afraid of the back of her head when it presented only a slender neck and two little rosy, close-set ears. But he didn’t mention his state of abasement to Quarren.

  A curious thing occurred, too: Jessie had evidently been gay on Sunday; and, Monday noon, while out for lunch, she had left on her desk two Coney Island postal cards decorated with her own photograph. When she returned, one card had vanished; and she searched quietly but thoroughly before she left for home that evening, but she did not find the card. But she said nothing about it.

  The dreadful part of the affair was that it was theft — the Earl of Dankmere’s first crime.

  Why he had taken it he did not know. The awful impulse of kleptomania alone seemed to explain but scarcely palliate his first offence against society.

  It was only after he realised that the picture and Jessie Vining vaguely resembled his dead Countess that his lordship began to understand why he had committed a felony before he actually knew what he was doing.

  Jessie Vining.

  And one day when Quarren was still out for lunch and Jessie had returned to her correspondence, the terrified Earl suddenly appeared before her holding out the photograph: and she took it, astonished, her lifted eyes mutely inquiring concerning the inwardness of this extraordinary episode.

  But Dankmere merely fled to the backyard and remained there all the afternoon smoking his head off; and it was several days before Jessie had an opportunity to find herself alone in his vicinity and to ask him with almost perfect self-possession where he had found the photograph.

  “I stole it,” said Dankmere, turning bright red to his ear-tips.

  “All she could think of to say was: ‘Why?’

  “It resembles my wife. So do you.”

  “Really,” she said coldly.

  Several days later she learned by the skilfully careless questioning of Quarren that the Countess of Dankmere had not existed on earth for the last ten years.

  This news extenuated the Earl’s guilt in her eyes to a degree which permitted a slight emotion resembling pity to pervade her. And one day she said to him, casually pleasant— “Would you care for that post-card, Lord Dankmere? If it resembles your wife I would be very glad to return it to you.”

  Dankmere, painfully red again, thanked her so nicely that the slight, instinctive distrust and aversion which, in the beginning, she had entertained for his lordship, suddenly disappeared so entirely that it surprised her when she had leisure to think it over afterward.

  So she gave him the post-card, and next day she found a rose in a glass of water on her desk; and that ended the incident for them both except that Dankmere was shyer of her than ever and she was beginning to realise that his aloof and expressionless deportment was due to shyness — which seemed to be inexplicable because otherwise timidity was scarcely the word to characterise his lively little lordship.

  Once, looking out of the rear windows, through the lace curtains she saw the Earl of Dankmere in the backyard, gravely turning handsprings on the grass while still smoking his pipe. Once, entering the gallery unexpectedly, she discovered the Earl standing at the piano, playing a rattling breakdown while his nimble little feet performed the same with miraculous agility and professional precision. She withdrew to the front door, hastily, and waited until the piano ceased from rumbling and the Oxfords were at rest, then returned with heightened colour and a stifled desire to laugh which she disguised under an absent-minded nod of greeting.

  Meanwhile one or two pictures had been sold to dealers — not important ones — but the sales were significant enough to justify the leasing of the basement. And here Quarren installed himself from morning to noon as apprentice to an old Englishman who, before the failure of his eyesight, had amassed a little fortune as surgeon, physician, and trained nurse to old and decrepit pictures.

  Not entirely unequipped in the beginning, Quarren now learned more about his trade — the guarded secrets of mediums and solvents, the composition of ancient and modern canvases, how old and modern colours were ground and prepared, how mixed, how applied.

  He learned how the old masters of the various schools of painting prepared a canvas or panel — how the snowy “veil” was spread and dried, how the under painting was executed in earth-red and bone-black, how the glaze was used and why, what was the medium, what the varnish.

  He learned about the “baths of sunlight,” too — those clarifying immersions practised so openly yet until recently not understood. He comprehended the mechanics, physics, and simple chemistry of that splendid, mysterious “inward glow” which seemed to slumber under the colours of the old masters like the exquisite warmth in the heart of a gem.

  To him, little by little, was revealed the only real wonder of the old masters — their astonishing honesty. He began to understand that, first of all, they were self-respecting artisans, practising their trade of making pictures and painting each picture as well as they knew how; that, like other artisans, their pride was in knowing their trade, in a mastery of their tools, and in executing commissions as honestly as they knew how and leaving the “art” to take care of itself.

  Also he learned — for he was obliged to learn in self-protection — the tricks and deceptions and forgeries of the trade — all that was unworthy about it, al
l its shabby disguises and imitations and crude artifices and cunning falsehoods.

  He examined old canvases painted over with old-new pictures and then relined; canvases showing portions of original colour; old canvases and panels repainted and artificially darkened and cleverly covered with both paint and varnish cracks; canvases that almost defied detection by needle-point or glass or thumb friction or solvent, so ingenious was the forgery simulating age.

  Every known adjunct was provided to carry out deception — genuinely old canvases or panels, old stretchers really worm-eaten, aged frames of the period, half-obliterated seals bearing sometimes even the cross-keys of the Vatican. Even, in some cases, pretence that the pictures had been cut from the frame and presumably stolen was carried out by a knife-slashed and irregular ridge where the canvas had actually been so cut and then sewed to a modern toile.

  For forgery of art is as old as the Greeks and as new as to-day — the one sinister art that perhaps will never become a lost art; and Quarren and his aged mentor in the basement of the Dankmere Galleries discovered more than enough frauds among the Dankmere family pictures showing how the little Earl’s forebears had once been gulled before his present lordship lay in his cradle.

  To Quarren the work was fascinating and, except for his increasing worry over Strelsa Leeds, would have been all-absorbing to the degree of happiness — or that interested contentment which passes for it on earth.

  To see the dull encasing armour of varnish disappear from some ancient masterpiece under the thumb, as the delicate thumb of the Orient polishes lacquer; to dare a solvent when needed, timing its strength to the second lest disaster tarnish forever the exquisite bloom of the shrouded glazing; to cautiously explore for suspected signatures, to brood and ponder over ancient records and alleged pedigrees; to compare prints and mezzotints, photographs and engravings in search for identities; to study threads of canvas, flakes of varnish, flinty globules of paint under the microscope; to learn, little by little, the technical manners and capricious mannerisms significant of the progress periods of each dead master; to pore over endless volumes, monographs, illustrated foreign catalogues of public and private collections — in these things and through them happiness came to Quarren.