From London Far

by Michael Innes

  It was Mr Neff who spoke. Making the round of the Cottage on his conveyor belts must have rapidly restored his equanimity – for now here he was come up behind them in the benignest manner.

  ‘Come along, Mr and Mrs Pantelli,’ said Mr Neff – and glanced rapidly across the billiard-room to see that the unspeakable Gipson was securely engaged. ‘We’ll go in to the coloured ones right now.’

  VIII

  And the coloured ones were there. Mr Neff threw open a door, flicked a switch, and Jean’s hypothesis of the King and the Invisible Clothes was instantly dissolved into the air from which it had been formed. Interminably down either wall of a gallery resplendent with marble and gold hung masterpiece upon masterpiece of European art. For Mr Neff had been a purchaser on an imperial scale, and of everything to which Don Perez had murdered and swindled his way the cream had clearly flowed into this one stupendous room. The International Society for the Diffusion of Cultural Objects had been altogether misnamed, since it had here achieved such a concentration as had never, perhaps, been known outside Europe before.

  Mr Neff, then, was far from communing with wallpaper or empty frames – unless, of course, his visitors had now been unwittingly hypnotized too. But if Jean was astray in her reckoning so equally was Meredith, since it was abundantly obvious that neither nice old ladies nor crop-haired girls displayed their handiwork here. Nearly all these pictures Meredith knew – and some of them so well that every crack and every missing flake of pigment was familiar to him. Whatever Mr Neff had spent, he had received value for his money. Here his surroundings, like those of a somewhat kindred spirit, the First Grand Thief of Milton’s poem, far outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.

  And Mr Neff knew it. A strange mingling of pride and humility irradiated the man as he shut the door behind him and turned to his guests. ‘I guess we’ll take a quick turn round first,’ he said. ‘Just give you an idea of what you’d most like to see.’ He paused. ‘If I could just bring that Jeff Gipson in here!’ he breathed. And then he chuckled. ‘Flosdorf is dead scared that sometime that guy will get me mad.’

  ‘I’m sure you never get mad,’ said Jean. ‘One turns so dispassionate once one realizes that art is beautiful–’

  ‘And would you say, Mr Neff’ – Meredith interrupted hastily – ‘that Flosdorf is dead scared about anything else?’

  Mr Neff stared. ‘Now, that’s a strange question. For Flosdorf has sure been kind of scared for a long time about I can’t figure what. And keeping some sort of hanky-panky in the background, too. Scurrying people away. Sometimes I’ve thought it was just he couldn’t keep girls out of the house, although he has a place called the Belvidere, not half a mile away, he can do what he likes. And when he’s scared about I can’t figure what I think it’s maybe just his nerves bad because of too much girl. But sometimes I think there’s something back of that. Now, this afternoon when I was starting to go up for a swim–’ Mr Neff checked himself. ‘But come along, Mr and Mrs Pantelli. Waste of time trying to figure out Flosdorf when I can show you Masaccio, Spinelli, Uccello–’ Again Mr Neff stopped short. ‘Masaccio!’ he exclaimed. ‘Now, if that isn’t darned queer. It’s just come back to me how Flosdorf started being scared. It was one day when we were talking about the little Masaccio over there by the Mantegna…hey?’

  For Jean had sharply exclaimed. But now she shook her head. ‘I’d just noticed one that is particularly beautiful, Mr Neff. But you were saying that Flosdorf–?’

  ‘Plumb scared as we stood there. Just as if he’d gotten a sudden shock. Paid less for it than he said, maybe, and thought I’d cottoned on to it.’

  ‘That would be it.’ Jean was looking at Mr Neff with sudden fascinated interest. ‘That would be it, Mr Neff. But let’s go round, like you said.’

  They went round – effortlessly, since a conveyor belt circum-locambulated the gallery. It was a very superior conveyor belt, having every appearance of a costly parquetry. And its speed could be regulated from a little dial carried in the hand, somewhat after the fashion of the instrument by which lazy people control the radio from an armchair. Everybody knows that there is something peculiarly fatiguing in tramping about a picture gallery. Mr Neff’s system, so excellent an innovation about Dove Cottage in general, was here particularly well-conceived. Physical effort being obviated, the soul was the more free for its adventures amid masterpieces.

  And an odd adventure among masterpieces was about to transact itself. But Mr Neff and Meredith, at least, were unaware of this. They went round the gallery together, conversing in a really friendly way. It was true that the pictures compacted here ought rightly to have been scattered over Europe from Paris to Odessa and from Oslo to Naples. But Meredith (recalling how soldiers had slept unwittingly on the Primavera of Botticelli) was so pleased to see them all safe and sound that he could not at the moment find it in his heart to hold Mr Neff in deep opprobrium. Besides, had not Mr Neff a scholarly eye? Already Meredith had forgotten the little matter of his host’s displeasure with Barcelona.

  And with a rather touching mixture of naïveté and conscientious reading Mr Neff was explaining the mysteries of the coloured ones. ‘It’s the grey tones,’ he said solemnly standing before a melancholic Hapsburg by Velasquez; ‘it’s all in the grey tones, Mr and Mrs Pantelli.’

  Meredith nodded – rather absently. He had just remembered that this particular Velasquez he had last seen when dining with its owner, a charming French viticulteur of classical tastes. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘–the grey tones. Have you had this one long?’

  But Mr Neff had pressed the button and they glided forward. ‘And here, Mr and Mrs Pantelli, is my best Titian – though I have a better coming from London.’ Mr Neff chuckled gleefully – and was immediately solemn once more. ‘This is early, of course. You can see Carpaccio in it, I dare say. And it has the kind of softness of Palma Vecchio, hasn’t it? Not that it could be anything but Titian, really. Look at the luminosity – and the saturation.’ And Mr Neff, having delivered himself of this culture-patter from whatever manuals he was in the habit of studying, fell silent. He looked aside now at one picture and now at another – he had instinctively the connoisseur’s distaste of gazing long at a single canvas – and then back at the Titian. ‘It’s the eye,’ he said – abruptly and as if the thought had just struck him. ‘Titian pleases the eye. And that isn’t just what you would say of Mantegna there, or of Piero della Francesca.’

  ‘No,’ said Meredith, ‘I suppose it’s not.’ Obscurely puzzled, he glanced at Mr Neff. There could be no doubt that Mr Neff had his natural-born sensibility about him still, and that not even reading popular treatises on the art of painting could blunt it. And yet about Mr Neff amid all this magnificence there was something different from what there had been before. It was as if here he was always faintly puzzled without at all knowing why.

  And even as this thought occurred to Meredith Mr Neff said something relevant to it. ‘You know,’ he began, ‘one of the strangest things about art is that so often there’s something that isn’t quite right about it. I’ve though a lot about that. In the East, now – and I’ve been told this by more than one man who collects Eastern art big – the artists will always leave something imperfect. Maybe it’s just a rug, and when you’re going to buy it you think you see a flaw and try to bring down the price. Well, you’re only giving yourself away. Because the flaw is there kind of deliberate. It’s something to do with their religion.’

  ‘On earth the broken arc,’ said Meredith, ‘in heaven the perfect round. And I dare say some Eastern artists may believe perfection to be impious. But in the West the artist, I should say, simply regrets his inability to achieve perfection. Somewhere craft must fail him always – the state of affairs of which the broken pair of compasses is the symbol. Deest quod duceret orbem.’

  Mr Neff received this speech with a good deal of attention. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there may be some
thing in that. But still I can’t figure it out. For instance, take the Masaccio–’

  ‘Mr Neff’ – it was Jean who interrupted – ‘have you always had just the cartoons and things showing in the house?’

  ‘More or less that, Mrs Pantelli – in order to be quiet, as I said, and no questions asked. But lately Flosdorf tightened up and made it quite a rule.’

  ‘Perhaps since you had your talk in front of the Masaccio?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Mr Neff, ‘it would be just about then, sure enough.’

  Masaccio, thought Meredith, means something like Hulking Tom. Or Lubberly Tom…he became aware that they were all three standing before Lubberly Tom’s little panel of the Virgin and Child enthroned, and that Mr Neff was talking still.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Mr Neff, ‘you go right into a picture like that and move about in it.’ He turned with sudden challenge to Meredith. ‘Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Oh, undoubtedly.’

  ‘It’s as if you were exploring it with all your muscles ever so slightly moving, so that there’s a sort of dance going on way inside yourself that’s like all the movements in the picture. Isn’t that so?’ And again Mr Neff looked challengingly at his guest.

  Meredith was highly pleased. It was really remarkable, he thought, that this untutored person should so accurately describe what aestheticians call the theory of empathy. ‘Oh, undoubtedly,’ he repeated. ‘Precisely so.’

  ‘And then – quite suddenly – it’s not like that any more. The dance kind of loses itself, and you feel like coming down stairs in the dark and taking a step that isn’t there. That right?’ And yet again Mr Neff looked at Meredith… Was there some strange glint of apprehensiveness in his eye?

  ‘Dear me, no. I should judge that to be a most unusual experience.’

  ‘But it is like that!’ Emphasis and something like the distant approaches of anger were in Mr Neff’s voice. ‘Art is beautiful – but nearly always there’s something that isn’t quite right about it. A picture like this’ – and he gestured at the Masaccio – ‘is like some fine piece of music with suddenly the player striking a false note. Don’t I get art the way Flosdorf can’t – and the way all those great experts come to see the cartoons and drawings do? So don’t I know? I guess it’s just that art is like most other things in life – always a fly in the ointment somewhere.’

  ‘But not in the Leonardo, or the Dürers, or the Rembrandt etchings.’ Jean spoke quietly, her eye fixed on the Masaccio panel. ‘There’s no fly in them. And that’s why it’s those that you keep about the house. They never let you down. They haven’t got a missing step in the dark.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean!’ The vehemence of Mr Neff’s protestation was matched by a growing panic in his glance. ‘Haven’t I found I understand art same as a kitten understands milk? And so if I see–’

  ‘Really,’ interrupted Meredith, ‘I am altogether perplexed – and especially in point of what you say about the Masaccio here. For it appears to me to be a singularly faultless and harmonious composition. Particularly in the colour. Consider how the whole is toned to that lovely olive green in the draperies of the angel musician on the left.’

  ‘Olive green?’ said Mr Neff. ‘Why, those draperies are a clear pale yellow.’

  It was disconcerting, Meredith thought, that Mr Neff should prove to be colour-blind. Curious that one who so keenly appreciated the linear and spatial qualities of the plastic arts, who was laboriously learned, too, on grey tones and saturation and luminosity, should in fact –

  Here Meredith caught Mr Neff’s eye and abruptly ceased to speculate. Instead, a first glimmering consciousness of what this odd revelation meant to the man himself came to him. Mr Neff was standing quite still and beads of sweat were trickling down his forehead. His jaw moved but no words came. Very stiffly, and agonizingly slowly – rather as if some system of creaking pulleys were in operation – he turned his head and looked at the Masaccio. ‘Did you say green?’ he asked.

  ‘An olive green.’ It was Jean who answered. ‘You see it as pale yellow because – well, because you see some colours differently from other people.’

  ‘Differently from what they really are?’

  ‘That’, interjected Meredith rather wildly, ‘is a question with a good deal of metaphysical interest. Colour being a secondary quality, and therefore coming into being only in the eye of the beholder–’

  ‘Yes!’ said Jean. ‘Quite definitely Yes. Normal people see those robes as green. Masaccio himself did. And the whole colour harmony of the painting turns on the particular greenness of that green. It is because you see a yellow that you think of that false note in music, or of the missing step in the dark.’

  ‘So I can’t ever be quite right about the coloured ones?’

  ‘No – I don’t think you can.’ With an obscure sense of the need for pushing the affair to its crisis, Jean had decided on this frank exposition of the case. ‘Not as far as the colour relations are concerned. And, of course, the planes and masses are in some way falsified for you too. Different passages of a painting than those which the artist designed will tend to withdraw or protrude. And colour-disposition is also, of course, a subtle balancing instrument. I dare say you feel one side of this Masaccio to be rather heavier than the other. But it isn’t. And again–’

  Mr Neff gave a shrill scream of rage; crouched; sprang. Meredith stepped hastily in front of Jean. But it was not she upon whom the disqualified connoisseur leapt; it was the Masaccio. He clawed it from the wall and for a moment held it before him – his complexion livid, his face twisted in fury. Then he hurled it to the floor. And just as the telephone had done, the Masaccio shivered into fragments.

  Again Mr Neff inarticulately screamed. There was a slaver at his lips. His eye was bloodshot and gleaming. From a pedestal beside him he seized and swung a heavy bronze statuette. His scream deepened to a purposive roar of rage and thence crystallised into a single word. ‘Yellow!’ yelled Mr Neff, ‘yellow!’ His glance roved the gallery and fixed itself upon a picture which Meredith had not yet observed: a vast composition of elongated and apocalyptic figures like so many yellow and green and rose-coloured flames. It was an El Greco and one of the great paintings of the world. Mr Neff advanced upon it, his statuette flailing the air.

  IX

  ‘STOP!’

  Flosdorf was not by nature an authoritative person. But as he burst into the gallery at this moment desperation lent him power. ‘Quit that!’ he shouted at his demented employer. ‘Quit it, I say! Don’t you know that picture’s worth close on one million dollars?’

  And momentarily Mr Neff paused – as he had long been conditioned to doing when a really tidy sum of money was mentioned. Flosdorf seized his chance. ‘Listen,’ he said urgently. ‘It’s not as bad as you think by a long way. I can fix it. Only give me that darn statuette.’

  ‘Fix it?’ Mr Neff’s reply was a snarl – but his hand was stayed. ‘D’you realize, you damned Flosdorf, that you and your son-of-a-bitch Society sold me more than five hundred pictures I can’t ever be right about – no, not even about the planes and the masses?’

  ‘But I tell you I can fix it.’ And Flosdorf turned to the door. ‘Hey, you,’ he yelled, ‘come right in. Come right in and meet the patient.’

  It was Higbed. Professional decorum and an abounding underlying vitality were alike indicated in his stride; his expression was that of one prepared to shed upon the Kama-Sutra and the Anangaraga – even upon the Perfumed Garden itself – the clear dry light of an impersonal science. He paused before a vast Rubens Rape of the Sabines – almost as if he supposed that these must be the ladies by whom his expository services were required – and then glanced in swift perplexity and distrust about the gallery. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘I don’t–’

  But Flosdorf had taken him unceremoniously by the buttonhole
and was leading him forward. ‘Here’s the guy will fix you up,’ he said encouragingly to his employer. ‘Properjohn and I had him shipped from England specially – and a whole library with him, too. No one with just his line in the States. Psychiatrist – deals with you when you’re imagining things. And your kind of trouble in particular. Psychogenic visual disturbance – that right?’ And Flosdorf turned to Higbed. ‘Speak up, you.’

  ‘I have certainly made some study of visual hallucinations in relation to the hysterias.’

  ‘There!’ Flosdorf was triumphant. ‘And when I saw you had this trouble that time we looked at the Masaccio I figured it you might get real mad as soon as you found out. So Properjohn and I read it up. Seems if you smoke too much you may come to see everything blue, and then the blue disappears and you just don’t see any colours at all. Seems if you were a kid and were frightened by some dame dressed all in purple–’

  ‘This is Mr Neff,’ said Jean to the bewildered Higbed. ‘He’s colour-blind, and never knew, and now he’s mad about it. And why they kidnapped you was to work a cure before he got madder and fired this Flosdorf and the rest. So get to work.’

  ‘Colour-blind? Cure?’ Higbed broke away from Flosdorf, seized Mr Neff by the arm and led him up to a Pinturicchio Madonna in Glory. He pointed at the Madonna’s robe, in which there was a large area of sombre red. ‘Now then, what colour’s that?’

  ‘Red,’ said Mr Neff.

  ‘And this?’ Higbed pointed to a small patch of the same hue on the cap of a donor.

  Mr Neff hesitated. ‘Kind of dark yellow,’ he said uncertainly.

  ‘And what about this?’ Higbed was pointing at the dull green of the donor’s hose.

  ‘Yellow. It’s a pale yellow. Almost the same as the little yellow flowers in the foreground.’ And Mr Neff, momentarily subdued and momentarily hopeful, looked almost timidly at his questioner.