And so Francis was about to say yes, and would have done if Ross had been able to hold his tongue. But his fatal urge toward speech stepped between Ross and his success.
“The gift could be anonymous, you know.”
“Of course. I would insist on that.”
“Then you agree.—Frank, I love you!”
The words startled Francis more than any blow. Oh God, this was putting a price on friendship, and no doubt about it!
“I haven’t agreed yet.”
“Oh yes you have! Frank, this will put everything right! Now, about price—let me get in touch with Prince Max tomorrow!”
“Prince Max?”
“Yes. Even you, drinker of cheap schlock though you are, must know about Prince Max, head of the great Maximilian wine-importers in New York? He’s acting on behalf of his wife. She was Amalie von Ingelheim and she inherited the whole collection from the old Gräfin.”
“Amalie von Ingelheim. I didn’t know she’d married Max! I know her—knew her.”
“Yes, she remembers you. Calls you Le Beau Ténébreux. Said you taught her to play skat when she was a kid.”
“Why is she selling?”
“Because she’s a girl with a head on her shoulders. She and Max are a thriving pair of aristocratic survivors. They even look alike, though he must be a good deal older than she is. She’s had a good career already as a model, but you know those careers don’t run much more than eighteen months. She’s been on the covers of the two biggest fashion magazines, and there’s no place else to go. She and Prince Max are buying a cosmetic business—a really good one—and she’ll make herself a hugely rich, international beauty.”
“And the pictures?”
“She says she never gave a damn about the pictures.”
“So? Little Amalie has certainly grown up—in a way.”
“Yes, but she’s not without heart. She’ll listen to reason. And if I tell her you are the buyer, everything will work out well. That’s to say, as cheaply as we have any right to expect—from aristocratic survivors. The picture could be here and in the Gallery before Christmas. What a gift to the nation!”
“There are six pictures, I believe. I’ve never seen any report that said which pictures. I can guess which ones might make a big price in the market. Is it the little Raphael?”
“No, not that one.”
“The Bronzino portrait?”
“No. Nor the Grunewald. Since the row here other buyers have appeared and five are gone. But she’s holding the one I want.”
Ruth had told Francis he had plenty of intuition. It had been slow in acting, but it worked now with full force.
“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 speech-writers; 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.