“I don’t like it, and neither do you. Nor does the Countess.”

“But we cannot deny it, or change it. These Nazi fanatics are picturesque, so one can take some comfort from that.”

Francis thought of the trains, whose journey to the concentration camp in the hills he was recording, and did not find it picturesque. But he said nothing.

Saraceni went on, serenely. “The modern passion for the art of the past is part of this terrible yearning for certainty. The past is at least done with, and anything that we can recover from it is solid goods. Why do rich Americans pay monstrous prices for paintings by Old Masters which they may, or may not, understand and love, if it is not to import into their country the certainty I am talking about? Their public life is a circus, but in the National Gallery at Washington something of God, and something of the comfort of God’s splendour, may be entombed. It is a great cathedral, that gallery. And these Nazis are ready to swap splendid Italian masters for acres of German pictures, because they want to make manifest on the walls of their Führermuseum the past of their race, and so give substance to the present of their race, and provide some assurance of the future of their race. It is crazy, but in a crazy world what can you expect?”

“What I can expect, it appears, is that some day I shall finish this idiotic job, or I shall go mad and kill you.”

“No, no, Corniche. What you can expect is that when you have finished that idiotic job you will be able to write a splendid hand like the great Cardinal Bembo. And by so doing you will achieve at least something of the outlook upon the world of that great connoisseur, for the hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand. You will not kill me. You love me. I am your Meister. You dote upon me.”

Francis threw an ink-bottle at Saraceni. It was an empty bottle, and he took care to miss his mark. Then they both laughed.

So the weeks and the months passed and Francis had been at Düsterstein for almost three years, during which he had worked without a holiday as Saraceni’s slave, then colleague, then trusted friend. True, he had been back to England twice, for a week each time, meeting the Colonel and—for colour—visiting Williams-Owen. But these jaunts could not be called holidays. He was on easier terms with the Countess, though no one was ever fully at ease with the Countess. Amalie had found her tongue and lost her love for Francis, and he taught her some trigonometry (of which Ruth Nibsmith knew nothing) and the elements of drawing, and a great deal about gin rummy and bridge. Amalie was on the way to becoming a great beauty, and although nothing much was said, it was apparent that Miss Nibsmith’s reign must soon give way to a broader education, probably in France.

“You don’t care, I suppose,” said Francis to Ruth, on one of their afternoon walks. “You’re not really a governess—not in the nineteenth-century Bronte sense—and surely you want to do something else.”

“So I shall,” said Ruth, “but I shall stay here as long as there is work for me to do. Like you.”

“Ah, well: I’m learning my craft, you see.”

“And practising your other craft. Like me.”

“Meaning?”

“Come on, Frank. You’re in the profession, aren’t you?”

“I’m a professional painter, if that’s what you mean.”

“Go on with you! You’re a snoop, and so am I. The profession.”

“You’ve left me behind.”

“Frank, nobody at Düsterstein is thick. The Countess has rumbled you, and so has Saraceni, and I rumbled you the first night I noticed you looking out of your open window, counting the cars on the Bummelzug. I was on the ground below, doing the same thing, just for the fun of it. A fine snoop you are! Standing in a window with a light behind you!”

“All right, officer. It’s a fair cop. I’ll come quietly. So you’re in the profession, too?”

“Born to it. My father was in it until he died on the job. Killed, very likely, though nobody really knows.”

“And what are you doing here?”

“That’s not a question one pro asks another pro. I’m just looking about. Keeping an eye on what you and the Meister are doing, and what the Countess and Prince Max do with that.”

“But you’ve never been in the shell-grotto.”

“Don’t need to go. I write the Countess’s letters, and I know what happens, however much she pretends it’s something else.”

“Doesn’t the Countess rumble you?”

“I hope not. It would be awful to think there were two snoops in one’s house, wouldn’t it? And I’m not very high-powered, you know. Just write the occasional letter home to my mum, who is a pro’s widow, and knows how to read them and what to pass on to the big chaps.”

“I know it’s nosy to ask, but do you get paid?”

“Ha ha; the profession relies to what might be considered a dangerous degree on unpaid help. The old English notion that nobody who is anybody really works for money. No, I work for nothing, on the understanding that if I shape up well I will be in line for a paid job some day. Women don’t get on very fast in the profession, unless they are elegant love-goddesses, and then they don’t last long. But I don’t grumble. I’m acquiring a useful command of Bavarian rural dialect and a peerless knowledge of the borderland between the Reich and Austria.”

“Not casting any horoscopes?”

“Plenty, but chiefly of people long dead. Why?”

“It was hinted to me that Prince Max would like to know what you think of his.”

“Oh, I know that. But I won’t bite. Anyhow, it would be bad for his character. Max is going to be rather famous.”

“How?”

“Even if I were sure I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Aha, I see in you the iconological figure of Prudence.”

“Meaning what?”

“The Meister has me hard at it studying all that sort of thing. So that I can read old pictures. All those symbolic women—Truth with her mirror, Charity suckling her child, Justice with her sword and balances, Temperance with her cup and ewer—scores of them; they are the sign language of a particular kind of art.”

“Well, why not? Have you anything better to do?”

“I have a block about that sort of thing. This Renaissance and pre-Renaissance stuff, where you make out the figures of Time, and his daughter Truth, and Luxury, and Fraud, and all those creatures, seems to me to pull a fine painting down to the level of moral teaching, if not actual anecdote. Could a great painter like Bronzino really have been so much of a moralist?”

“I don’t see why not. It’s just romantic nonsense to suppose that painters have always been rowdies and wenchers. Most of them were daubing away like billy-o in order to get the means to live the bourgeois life.”

“Oh well—it’s very dull learning iconology and I am beginning to wish something interesting would happen.”

“It will, and soon. Just hang on a bit. Some day you will be really famous, Francis.”

“Are you being psychic?”

“Me? What put that into your head?”

“Saraceni did. He says you are very much a psychic.”

“Saraceni is a mischief-making old nuisance.”

“Rather more than that. Sometimes when I listen to him going on about the picture exporting and importing business that he and the Countess are up to, I feel like Faust listening to Mephistopheles.”

“Lucky you. Would anybody ever have heard of Faust if it hadn’t been for Mephistopheles?”

“All right. But he has in a high degree the trick of making the worse seem the better cause. And he says it’s because conventional morality takes no heed of art.”

“I thought he said art was the higher morality.”

“Now you are beginning to sound like him. Listen, Ruth, aren’t we ever going to get together in bed again?”

“Not a hope, unless the Countess goes away on one of her jaunts and takes Amalie with her. In the Countess’s house and under her eye I play by the Countess’s rules, and I can’t be having it off with you when I am supposed to be gently watching over the precious virginity of her granddaughter. Fair’s fair, and that’s a little too much in the line of eighteenth-century castle intrigue for my taste.”