“You speak with great certainty,” said Professor Baudoin, with unconcealed gloating. “But you are—if you will allow me to speak of it—a very young man, and the certainty of youth is not always appropriate to such matters as this. You will give us reasons, of course.”

Indeed I shall, thought Francis. You think Letztpfennig is virtually destroyed and now you want to destroy me because I am young. Well—bugger you, you bad-breathed old nuisance.

“I am sure your colleague will be glad to give his reasons,” said Huygens, the peacemaker. “If they are truly convincing, we shall call back the experts from Britain, who will make scientific appraisals.”

“I don’t think you will need to do that,” said Francis. “The picture has been put forward as a van Eyck, and it certainly is not by van Eyck, either Hubertus or Jan. Have any of you gentlemen visited the zoo lately?”

What was this about the zoo? Was the young man trifling with them?

“A detail of the painting tells us all we need to know,” Francis continued. “Observe the monkey who hangs by his tail from the bars of Hell, in the upper left-hand corner of the picture. What is he doing there?”

“It is an iconographical detail that one might expect in such a picture,” said Letztpfennig somewhat patronizingly toward the young man, glad to defend the monkey. “The chained monkey is an old symbol of the fallen mankind that preceded the coming of Christ. Of souls in Hell, in fact. He belongs with the defeated devils.”

“But he is hanging by his tail.”

“Since when do monkeys not hang by their tails?”

“They did not do so in Ghent in van Eyck’s day. That monkey is a Cebus capudnus, a New World monkey. The chained monkey of iconography is the Macacas rhesus, the Old World monkey. Such a monkey as that, a monkey with a prehensile tail, was unknown in Europe until the sixteenth century, and I need not remind you that Hubertus van Eyck died in 1426, The painter, whoever he is—or was—wanted to complete his composition with a figure, not too commanding, in that particular spot, so the chained monkey had to be hanging by his tail from the bars of Hell. There are several examples of both Cebus capucinus and Macacus rhesus informatively labelled in your very good local zoo. That is why I mentioned it.”

In the melodrama of the nineteenth century there may frequently be found such stage directions as Sensation! Astonishment! Tableau! This was the gratifying effect produced by Francis’s judgement. None of the experts tried to suggest that they were well up in the lore of monkeys, but when they were shown the obvious they made haste to declare that it was indeed obvious. This is one of the things experts are frequently called on to do.

As they chattered learnedly, assuring each other that they had had some uneasiness about the monkey, Letztpfennig was understandably undergoing great stress. The big guard brought him a chair, and he sat on it and drew his breath painfully. But he regained his self-possession, rose to his feet, clapped his hands authoritatively, like a professor calling a class to order.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “you shall know that I painted this picture. Why did I do so? In part as a protest against the fanatical adoration that is accorded to our Dutch masters of an earlier day, that is so frequently linked with a depreciation of modern painters. It is a bad principle that nothing may be praised without dispraising something else. Nobody nowadays can paint like the Old Masters! That is untrue. I have done so, and I know there are many others who could do it as well as I. It is not done, of course, because it is a kind of artistic fancy-dress, an insincerity, an imitation of another man’s style. I fully agree that a painter should work in the mode—speaking very generally—of his own time. But that is not because it is a degenerate mode, adopted because he cannot paint as well as his great artistic predecessors.

“Now listen to me patiently, if you please. You have all praised this painting for its skill in colour and design, and its power to lift the heart as only a great picture can do. At one time or another you have all spoken highly of it, and several of you have professed yourselves delighted with it. What delighted you? The magic of a great name? The magic of the past? Or was it the picture before your eyes? Even you, Mr. Thresher, before you found that under no circumstances could you buy this picture for your great client, spoke of it to me in terms that made my heart sing in my breast. The work of a very great master, you said, if not indubitably a van Eyck. Well—? I am the very great master. Do you take back everything you said?”

Thresher said nothing, and none of the other experts were inclined to speak, except Baudoin, who was hissing in Belmann’s ear that he had never trusted the craquelure.

It was the Judge who spoke, and he spoke like a judge. “We must bear in mind, Mynheer Letztpfennig, that you offered the picture for sale as a genuine van Eyck, and with it you offered a tale about its origins which we now know to be untrue. That cannot be explained away as part of a protest on behalf of the skill of modern painters.”

“But how else was I to get attention for my picture? How else was I to make my point? If I had made it known that Jean-Paul Letztpfennig, professor of art, restorer of Old Masters, known as a painter condemned to mediocrity by those who profess to rank artists as if they were schoolboys, had painted a great painting in an old style, how many of you would have crossed your doorstep to see it? Not one! Not one! But as things are you have used words like masterpiece, and transporting beauty. At what were they directed? Toward what you saw, or merely toward what you thought you saw?”

“The Judge is right,” said Addison Thresher. “You wanted the top dollar for your picture, not only for its beauty—which I don’t deny—but for the glamour of age and a great name. And we fell for it! It’s a fine painting, but where can you sell it? I guess it’s a draw. Certainly so far as I am concerned, it’s a draw.”

Of course, it wasn’t a draw, and the international press turned it into a sensation. How did they find out what had happened? When eleven men are in a room and something of unusual interest takes place, at least one of them is likely to let something drop which the press seizes on, and the hunt is up. The one who was supposed to have leaked the story was Sluyters, the guard, who was not nearly so impassive as he looked, and who would have been glad to tell what he knew for a consideration. But did nobody else say a word? Certainly Francis didn’t until he was back at Düsterstein, but who can answer for Addison Thresher? Did the Judge drop a word to his wife, who may have told an intimate friend in the uttermost confidence? The Germans certainly were not silent when they reported to their superiors, and through them to the Reichsmarschall, who was not known for being close-mouthed. The two Frenchmen and the Belgian would not be inclined toward silence; they had risked little and gained much, for they had been in on a great unmasking which gave the international art world something to talk about for many months.

“Monkey Blows Hoax” was the headline in one form or another, and one paper carried a caricature of Francis instructing the experts, based on a famous painting of the Boy Christ Teaching in the Temple.

“I see that the Letztpfennig file is now closed,” said Saraceni, raising his eyes from the Völkischer Beobachter he had been reading in the shell-grotto.

“Are they dropping all charges?” said Francis.

“No charges are effective now. He has killed himself.”

“Oh God! The poor devil!”

“Do not reproach yourself, Corniche. I told you to kill him, and you killed him. You destroyed him professionally on my instruction and now he has yielded up his life of his own volition. In a very interesting way, too. He lived in Amsterdam in one of those lovely old houses on a canal. You know how they have projecting mounts for cranes hanging over the canal bank, so that in the old days those merchant houses could have goods hauled up to the top floor for storage? Picturesque old things. It seems Letztpfennig hanged himself on his crane, right out over the canal. When he was retrieved by the police they found a note pinned to his coat. Oddly enough, he had worn his overcoat and hat to die in. The note said: ‘Let them say what they will now; in the beginning they said it was a great picture.’—My dear man, are you unwell? Perhaps you had better take the day off. You have done quite enough for art, for the present.”