Fortunately, Properjohn misinterpreted his gesture as one of unrestrained admiration. He cocked his head on one side. ‘Toppin’ little think, eh what, m’dear fellow?’ Chuckling at this return to his favourite comedy of the laird, Properjohn held out a glass. Then his face grew serious and it was clear that he saw his guest once more against the background of a veritable promised land of Rembrandts and Goyas. Soberly he set down both glasses the better to make a formal bow. ‘Better your Excellency come alonk see the boss,’ he said. ‘Not like small Wop Pantelli dealt with efficient by me and not know any better than that I run it.’
‘The boss?’ asked Meredith stupidly – but feeling as he did so that a great light dawned. This grotesque Properjohn, so lamentably deficient in an aura of the higher criminality, was but a screen behind which moved superior powers. And these superior powers were on the premises. An introduction was imminent.
For now Properjohn had turned and was leading the way out through a farther door. His head showed a bald patch behind. Here, had Meredith still so desired, was the right target for the galleon. Alternatively, he could assay the pleasure of leaping upon Properjohn from behind and throttling him. Or he could simply try one tremendous kick and then race for freedom. But none of these proposals had any charm for Meredith at this moment. Not even the business of saving the art treasures of Europe was sovereign with him. Once more – as upon a fateful occasion in a tobacconist’s shop – simple intellectual curiosity held sway.
Properjohn walked down several corridors and mounted a staircase. Meredith had a fleeting impression of a butler or factotum carrying a tray, of maidservants of a respectable but personable sort flitting about with the cans of hot water proper to this evening hour – of these and other fugitive evidences of a gentleman’s well conducted house. And then Properjohn had opened a door and momentarily disappeared; his barbarous lingo was queerly mingled with a cultivated voice in rapid question and answer; he emerged and gestured somewhat after the fashion of a Lord Chamberlain according the grande entrée to a visitor of consequence.
And Meredith entered an altogether different sort of room. Over the fireplace hung Vermeer’s Aquarium – which all the world knows has its proper abiding place at Scamnum Court. There was one other work of art; Meredith after a single glance knew that it was by Praxitiles. And from behind a gold-inlaid desk which had once been Napoleon’s there advanced an old man with a high forehead and silver hair. ‘My dear Herr Vogelsang,’ he said, ‘we welcome you as from the dead. And welcome indeed, my dear sir, to the headquarters of the International Society for the Diffusion of Cultural Objects.’
IX
Were I from Dunsinane away and clear, Profit again should hardly draw me here… But still (thought Meredith) curiosity might. For Don Perez Sierra y Campo (which turned out to be the name of his new acquaintance) was an altogether more interesting person than either Properjohn or the now imminently expected Bubear. For one thing, not even the English of the Misses Macleod of Moila was purer than that dispensed by Don Perez over his dinner table. And for another, he proceeded to expound in this limpid medium a veritable philosophy of theft. More confidently than Autolycus justifying himself as a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles did this polished gentleman defend his endeavours to carry away the greater part of the treasures of Europe.
‘We regret the Mykonos Marbles,’ he said, ‘and are the more rejoiced to hear that you may find means to regain them from the man Marsden. Properjohn mentioned a girl whose – ah – friendship you have succeeded in cultivating; and who is, it seems, at the castle. I confess that the matter is obscure to me, but no doubt you will provide enlightenment as your leisure serves.’
‘Marsden’s girl’, said Meredith, ‘is likely to be useful in more ways than one–’
‘Ah,’ said Don Perez urbanely.
‘–and I don’t really care to leave her there. Particularly as Bubear, who appears unreliable, almost certainly misdirected us to the castle for some dishonest purpose of his own.’
‘It is not improbable,’ said Don Perez. ‘Everywhere, indeed, we may discern symptoms of widespread moral disintegration. I should have no confidence in the integrity of the man Bubear.’
‘In fact, after dinner, it will be as well that I should go across and fetch her away.’ Meredith dropped this proposal very casually indeed. ‘May I congratulate you on your claret?’
Don Perez bowed. ‘Mouton Rotchield, Herr Vogelsang, of a year which I confess indifferently good. Wine at least will here and there incarnadine to the last the ashen pages of the European decadence! And when this continent is no more than a fading history shall we not recall its vanished epochs primarily in terms of wine and flowers? Mouton Rotchield and the beautiful – if absurdly named! – roses of modern horticulture will seem one with the violets of Catullus and the vine-leaves of Anacreon. Let them give you a little more of this very tolerable Chateaubriand which they have managed to scrape up for us.’ Don Perez paused. ‘As for your suggestion of fetching the girl tonight, I counsel – nay, I judge – against it. That the Marbles should be retrieved is excellent. But we must not forget that there are plenty good fish in the sea! For example, you can doubtless suggest where several equally fine archaic sculptures can be rescued?’
‘Assuredly I can.’ Meredith spoke with sober confidence. Was this elegant scoundrel, he wondered, with all his Mouton Rotchield and his fiddle-faddle of Anacreon and Catullus, really a person of substantial antiquarian culture? He decided to make a cast towards finding out. ‘Assuredly I can,’ he repeated. ‘What would you say, for example, to the Locri Fawn?’
Don Perez looked momentarily puzzled. Then, politely, he laughed. ‘You are pleased to joke with me, Herr Vogelsang. But after all, it is natural that you should not wish to divulge these matters until we have discussed the terms of our association.’
This was not so good. For the Locri Fawn was a statue which existed only in a work of imaginative literature – and Don Perez had been right on the spot within seconds.
Meredith began to pine for the less well-informed Properjohn – who had not been admitted to the present refined repast. He wished, too, that he had not talked so much bold nonsense about the Mona Lisa and the Burial of Count Orgaz. And was Don Perez Sierra y Campo really taken in, as undoubtedly Bubear and Properjohn had been? Or was this excellent dinner merely the graceful preliminary to a gesture which should unequivocally invite one to step into a sack? Meredith took a sip of claret – for, after all, there is nothing quite like a great claret for sharpening the perceptions and subtilizing the mind – and resolved to play the game out. ‘May I ask’, he said, ‘if you feel satisfied with your operations to date?’
Don Perez shook his head sadly – but not before he, too, had applied himself to his glass. ‘The Society does what it can. But much, I fear, is bound to go down with the ship.’
‘The ship?’
Don Perez looked courteously surprised. ‘Europe, my dear sir.’
‘You are so sure of its sinking?’ With concentrated effort Meredith smothered in himself sudden anger. ‘You don’t think that it may, after all, right itself again? I am, I fear, no historian – except in the field of aesthetics, maybe – but such inquiries as I have made suggest to me that over and over again cultivated Europeans have despaired of the stability of their civilization. Theirs is the fated generation at last! But it has been all tommyrot every time.’
‘But not this time, Herr Vogelsang! And the whole labours of our Society (to which I trust you are firmly resolved to ally yourself) are undertaken in the light of that conviction. As a civilization Europe is bankrupt. To contemplate it is to achieve what a distinguished compatriot of yours has termed ein Blick ins Chaos, a glance into the abyss. Everywhere public order perishes, and civil polity has become but a historical phenomenon.’ And Don Perez paused on this beautiful cadence, evidently to let it linger on the ear much as he let t
he Mouton Rotchield linger on the palate. ‘It is sad,’ he said, ‘very sad – but at least our duty is clear.’
‘I cannot help feeling that you take a very exaggerated view.’ Meredith was much too indignant at this impudent perversion of truths which were indeed sad enough to be very careful in remembering his part. ‘In England, at least, I see a great deal of public order – if anything, rather too much. And the Continent, after all, has shown immense powers of resistance to the very storms it has let loose upon itself. This is true, for example, of the artists and men of letters of France. It has been true of many scholars – and of many simple people too – in my own country, Germany. And resistance means resilience. I believe that the social order, or what you call our civil polity, must be altogether changed. But of our powers of recuperation I have no doubt whatever. Nor can I believe that you, Don Perez, who belong to one of the oldest of Mediterranean civilizations–’
‘What you say interests me.’ And Don Perez Sierra y Campo looked at Meredith as if it were true that he was very interested indeed. ‘But we must not let the mere fact of being ourselves Europeans carry us away. Let us suppose ourselves to be New Zealanders, as was the man whom your great writer, Lord Macaulay–’
‘Surely,’ said Meredith calmly, ‘Macaulay was an Englishman.’
‘I beg your pardon.’ And Don Perez gave a little bow. ‘Whom their great writer, Lord Macaulay, pictured as musing over the ruins of London. Let us imagine ourselves, I say, to be New Zealanders. Or, better, let us suppose ourselves observers in Mars, such as one finds in the romances of your – of the English novelist, Wells.’
‘By all means,’ said Meredith, ‘let us imagine ourselves to be Martians.’ Don Perez, he was reflecting, certainly did not make these little slips at random. Either he knew – or he was attempting to unnerve a suspected man. ‘Or let it be inhabitants of the moon – whom another Englishman, a poet, describes as betwixt the angelical and human kind. For what could fit persons so benevolent as you and I, Don Perez, better than that? Thank you: by all means another glass.’ And Meredith took the decanter and poured wine with a steady hand.
‘Whether from Mars or from the moon,’ pursued Don Perez, ‘we can survey both sides of the Atlantic at once. On the one hand, we see the smouldering ashes of a million destroying fires. We see shattered cathedrals; whole cities surviving from the Middle Ages only to be flattened from the air; canvases, which enshrine not individual genius alone, but centuries and centuries of the very mind of Europe, huddled in salt mines or trucked about as some war lord’s booty. It is a veritable Götterdämmerung–’
‘Quite so,’ said Meredith. ‘And an Untergang des Abendlandes. And Blick ins Chaos we have already had.’
Don Perez slightly raised his eyebrows. ‘But now for the other view! And it is veritably a case, as your great poet Shakespeare said–’ Don Perez paused. ‘For I think you will agree that Shakespeare has been conclusively proved to have been a German?’
‘I see no harm’, said Meredith dryly, ‘in the simpler of my fellow countrymen believing so.’
‘It is a case, then, of looking on this picture and on that. For we turn from this savage spectacle to the shores of North America and are at once greeted with the heartening spectacle of advancing culture and ordered progress! Here, and here alone, can we look to see the millennial achievements of western civilization revered, perpetuated, deepened, and renewed.’
‘There may be something in what you say.’ Perhaps because of the claret, or perhaps because of the moorland air, Meredith found this vein of eloquence in Don Perez decidedly soporific. ‘I am not at all disposed to question the likely cultural predominance of the United States. It will issue naturally from an economic predominance: their Rome to our Greece.’
‘Precisely so; most happily put, my dear Herr Vogelsang! And now consider how the cultural heritage of Greece was transferred to Rome. Or, even better, consider how the surviving art and literature of the entire ancient world was secured for the modern world in the Renaissance period.’
‘Ah,’ said Meredith. ‘Theft.’
‘It often came to that. Manuscripts, for example, were rescued from neglect and decay amid a degenerate monasticism by whatever means best served. And have not we – benevolent Martians dipping down from space – a similar duty today? We must rescue what we can from the decay of Europe and transfer it to the security and just esteem of the United States. And I say just esteem advisedly. You have only to consider what they are prepared to pay.’ Don Perez paused while his butler served an ice pudding and uncorked a bottle of champagne. ‘For our wares’, he pursued, ‘are almost the only conceivable goods which our transatlantic friends cannot produce for themselves. And how vastly important they are in maintaining the intellectual and aesthetic equilibrium of a continent so vastly and rapidly expansive on the material side! It is our merchandise alone, my dear sir, that may usefully be called in from the Old World to redress the balance of the New.’
Meredith looked distrustfully at his champagne. Was it the extreme felicity of Don Perez’s expression that was getting on his nerves? Or was it the knowledge that at this very moment Properjohn and a newly arrived Bubear might be getting matters straight in another room? ‘You put the matter admirably,’ he said, ‘and I look forward with pleasure to our continued cordial association. But don’t you think it a great pity that all this has to be done in so clandestine a way? It limits the market so. Just think how much better it would be if, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York were prepared to ask no questions of a benevolent Martian coming forward with a well-known Gainsborough or Raeburn.’
Don Perez Sierra y Campo sighed. ‘Ah, my dear sir, there is a vision of enlightenment indeed! But can we doubt that the time will come, and that quickly?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact, I doubt it very much.’
Don Perez shook his head indulgently. ‘Herr Vogelsang, did anyone bother his head when Lord Elgin walked off with most of the sculptures from the Parthenon?’
Meredith sat up. ‘Most decidedly a good many people did! He had to defend himself in a pamphlet which he called Memorandum on the Subject of the Earl of Elgin’s Pursuits in Greece.’
Don Perez bowed – thereby indicating, it seemed, that he had been agreeably instructed by a fellow scholar. ‘Very well! And doubtless we shall put out our own pamphlet one day – though I suspect that it will be an altogether more substantial monograph. The Early History of the International Society for the Diffusion of Cultural Objects. But my point is simply this. At present we have to rely on enlightened collectors who are prepared to keep their acquisitions in private. But in a hundred – nay, perhaps in fifty – years all this will be changed. For the populations of Europe will be no more than a peasantry and a wandering banditti. And thus when these works of art are brought forth from their half-century of seclusion men will no more think to inquire of their former owners’ rights than they do of tom-toms and totem-poles in some museum of Polynesian anthropology.’
It suddenly occurred to Meredith to wonder whether Don Perez really believed in this remarkable Shape of Things to Come – which would mean, surely, that he was mad. And the thought of madness suggested something else. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘what are your plans in regard to that fellow Higbed?’
‘Higbed?’ Don Perez stared. ‘You mean the psychiatrist and author of all those facile books? I have no plan in regard to him whatever. Except, of course, on no account to read him.’
This was interesting. It suggested that just as Bubear was by way of doing a little business behind the back of Properjohn so was Properjohn behind the back of Don Perez. Indeed, had not Properjohn said something to the effect that Higbed was a private speculation of his own? This mystery there seemed no penetrating. And meantime would not Don Perez think it odd that his new associate Vogelsang should ask so random a question?
But Don P
erez’s mind was moving in another direction. ‘Not’, he said, ‘that the celebrated Higbed is at all an exception in that respect. I seldom read anything fresh from the printing presses. Indeed, as I grow older I turn back more and more to my Homer and my Theocritus, to my Martial, my Juvenal, and my Horace.’
Meredith suddenly felt an uncomfortable pricking of the spine. Was it possible that this well-dieted rascal – who now seemed to be proposing to move on from champagne to port – not only knew who he, Meredith, was not, but also – And here Meredith came upon an interesting fact of mind. Between the disastrous consequences of being known not Vogelsang, and those of being known positively as Richard Meredith, editor of Martial and authority on Juvenal, there was surely nothing to choose. And yet the suspicion that he was known was infinitely more unnerving than the suspicion that he was detected. Was this not a survival of primitive man’s irrational belief that knowledge of his name would arm his enemy with some magical advantage? Meredith was so taken with this discovery that he now spoke with very little notion of what he was saying. ‘What put Higbed in my mind’, he said, ‘was again that fellow Bubear – who seems an altogether unreliable man. He told me–’
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