The Lost Cavern
Page 9
I’d like, then, to show you some of its points as well as to tell you a little of its story so you’ll be able to appreciate it better. I don’t think anyone at first sight could have any true idea of the value of the thing. I know I hadn’t the slightest idea when I first became interested in it. So, believe it or no, that’s why I’m so pleased I was in and up when you called for it. Perhaps I might say that in a way I’ve been expecting you; no, I’ve put it wrong; what I ought to say is, I had a feeling that somehow the story needed one more element in it. Not the story of the thing as a whole. I don’t know that, though I can suspect that it’s so big we’d be here a thousand and one nights and still not have it told. I’m only asking you to listen for a few minutes while I outline its story, as far as I know it, which is mainly its story as far as it concerns me—and you.
You’re puzzled? Of course, it’s not the reception one would have expected, I can see that; but again I must assure you that when you’ve heard me out you’ll agree with me that there’s really nothing unnatural in that. Just a moment while I show it to you. There, now I’ve put aside the silk cover, we can study it. You see these lights are arranged so as to focus on it. If you’ll put down that fine piece of workmanship—I was once a pretty good judge of that sort of expert craftsmanship, too—on the bookshelf there beside you, you’ll be able to study this other object better. Your own objet d’art will be within handy reach if you feel you want it at any moment. Though I perceive you’ve seen that this really isn’t a situation in which you’d require that sort of argument. But I agree, though it’s not quite wise in this part of the world to be found with that kind of work of art on one, it is hard not to carry it about, once one gets into the habit. And beautiful in its way, very beautiful in its efficiency, with that latest invention fitted to it: the silencer—such fine functional lines. This other object is, of course, a contrast. Two different epochs, with their different outlooks. Beside you there on the bookshelf, the perfect means to get your way. And here in this niche—well, it is a means, too, but something of an End, too. And it leads to another Way.
Words! A wordy old man, you say, to whom you’ll not give another five minutes. Well, give me four, and lend me your four ears and eyes. Yes, it’s rightly called the Saxlin Treasure. It’s certainly unique. The ordinary good dealer or collector would say Byzantine. He’d be getting there, but still far from his goal, far from the true secret. The actual provenance of this piece—you’d need one of the twenty leading authorities of the world to place it, and then they’d still be fairly vague and differ where to pin it down on the map. It’s Near Eastern, we agree. I can see you haven’t much time, so I’ll tell you without all the detailed proof. You can have that after, if you wish. Historically it’s as important as it’s artistically beautiful—unique on both counts. And yet the thing in itself is more strange and valuable. But I’ll leave that till the end, and you needn’t hear that part of the story if, by the time you have the art history for your future buyer, you don’t want to spend any more time. Well, it’s Armenian. And, what’s more, it’s of a particularly important date: it’s Armenian Nestorian. You must understand the importance of that, for it adds hugely to the value of the piece. It must have been made for some Armenian cathedral for the short time while the great counter-checking movement to Matriolatry for a moment nearly swung religion back, through the whole Middle East, to Patriolatry. That sounds like jargon to you, but, believe me, you’d better memorize it, for it will be needed by your buyer, if, as you reckon, he’s one of the big ones. Every one of those technical phrases I’ve just used will put another grand into your pocket.
And now to the work itself. You see, it’s a chalice of gold, the foot set with large pieces of lapis and jade. Then, as you go up the stem, you will find all of the twelve precious stones mentioned in The Apocalypse as the foundations of the New Jerusalem. They are fixed in one by one, like layers of insulating material, and held in this reticulated column of gold. That central boss, which all chalices have, contains a red stone roughly cut. Yes, it’s a ruby of the same size as that of the Black Prince in the jewel-chamber in the Tower of London. That and this are the largest I’ve ever seen, and precious stones once interested me considerably. This one stands, of course, for the Precious Blood. The web-lines of this little cage of gold which holds it are wrought to make the words so famous in the Eucharist that they stayed on in Greek in the Latin rite when all the rest of the Greek words went: Kyrie eleison, the master appeal of the rite, the power words of petition. They are damascene inlaid with blue enamel. You’d think it Limoges work, but perhaps you know that Limoges’ source, the enamelers’ true Mecca, was of course Damascus, and I’d wager this was made there. A single crystal of quartz, uncommonly long in axis, flawless and complete, makes the upper part of the shaft with fine outer columns of gold to hold it in place, symbolic, I guess, of the Holy Ghost descending through the channel of the Church. And then the cup itself opens, carved from a single purple-red amethyst. Could you imagine a more splendid vessel or one more perfectly symbolic? Yes, study it well. Come close. But one thing I ask, more for you than for me, if you’d believe it, don’t touch till you’ve decided to pocket it, until you’ve heard why I’m here with it. I promise you the story is a good one.
I’d wager, too, if I was a betting man, as I was once, and used to win, that you’ll find this story of mine may well add vastly to the value of the piece for you. You’re wondering why it wasn’t lifted before? Yes, I knew I was right, and I can answer your question. That’s precisely where my story comes in. It can give the answer to your question, for otherwise, surely, the thing must be a fake. A treasure of that sort, just its jewel and gold worth, or its history worth, or its art value, any of these would have whisked it off into a vault, a tomb, a lost church treasury, a buried cache, or even a melter pot long before now, if there wasn’t some catch in it. Well, scan it closely. Yes, take out that lens and look at it and remember what you’ve heard. Yes, it’s known and yet it’s left alone, left to its work. Why? People who don’t know say “Fake”; people who do know don’t say. That’s the state of affairs, the true and, as we might say, the fundamental Taoist state of affairs. I thought you were an artist. You can study it, and thank you for not touching it. Your eye can tell you more than your hand, I warrant. Yes, you will be interested by my story and, maybe, see the point of it—a person like you, who carries that pretty piece lying on the shelf ready to your hand and that fine collector’s lens in your other pocket. Believe me, we are more alike in our beginnings than you can know, but you will in a few moments. And, because we are alike in the start, I am beginning to wonder whether we haven’t met in order that, perhaps, you may well in your end be like what I’ve become.
First to our question, our practical question: If this is authentic, then why not looted long before, when you could walk straight in, et cetera. To an open mind, my story, I think, goes far to explain that, and since you have lived so odd a life, I believe you may have that. I’m an American like you. Yes, I am. I’m a Midwesterner, so Midwestern that I was one of those who hated to own that I was. All through high school I was determined to get that sense of being in the Corn Belt out of me. How I despised that massive vitality that can live and thrive in a climate which in summer is as hot as the ordinary medieval Hell and in winter as cold as Dante’s final inferno center and has just those two paradisaical moments to refresh it in between, like St. Brendan’s vision of Judas, let out of his torment for one day of the year to cool off on an iceberg. And I saw my way out. Culture had come to Okoshen City. Our art teacher also felt himself to be an exile. He brought down men, wonderful men, magi; wise men from the Atlantic East, with wonderful accents, what we took for Oxford drawls and what were probably quite good replicas of French uvula’d “r”s. They taught us all about the lesser-lit masters: nothing so vulgar as Michelangelo and Raphael, but Masaccio, Giorgione, Del Sarto, Sodoma, right down to Carravagio and Tiepolo, and in music, of course, Buxtehude not B
ach, Rameau not Gluck. I see you know the trick, for trick it is, however pathetic. It’s the trick of escape—escape from the rough revitalizing touch of the Real, escape from here and now. And I was sufficiently in a corner with myself to see that it was an escape. There was just enough honesty in me for me to see I was dishonest, and just as much of a sham, as—no, rather more than—the others who took their culture course just to be able to talk at parties about the latest book or lecture that had turned up in town. For they did know what they were up to, really, and I saw I must, too. What was my motive?
Theirs wasn’t wholly bad: they did want the Middle West to get culture because they thought that somehow it would make the men more humane, the women less emotional or dreary. It was a pathetic little bow to beauty and a faint hope that we might become like what we admired. They thought, maybe, that if they heard lectures and learned to pronounce Italian, they’d produce one day for their little city works of great art—objects like that in this room with us now. They wanted the flowers of the Tree of Life to appear at once. But culture grows from cultus, and cultus is religion. Without religion there can’t in the end be great art. But that’s premature. Back to me: I woke up one day to see that my motivation wasn’t to become cultured and superior but just the determination to make these people admit that I was so much better than they, of such finer clay, that I shouldn’t have to work; they’d keep me. I belonged to the I.W.W., the “I won’t work” party. My next discovery was that they knew that, too. Do what I would with my many small gifts—and I had about as many as an unpruned tree has undersized fruits—they saw as well as I that I just wasn’t going to work, I wasn’t going to be an artist. For they had seen, as clearly as I, that an artist works harder than any artisan ever does, at least as long as the artisan can find a union to protect him from starvation.
Well, there I was, resolved not to work, facing the fact that art is work, just as bad as real-estate development, or farming, for that matter, and that all my pose would never fill my pockets but only lose me friends I might have had. And then that strange thing we first call luck, then the devil, and finally—well, again I’ll leave that to you to judge when I end my story—stepped in. One day we had a lecturer more sophisticated than any before. London clothes, Oxford-Paris accent, quoting in four languages, fluent, and, final elegance: not only obviously bored with us—we were used to that patronage—but, delicious finish, bored with his subject. He amused himself, bewildered and upset the rest of the audience, but delighted me by telling us what a fraud art was, what nonsense art appreciation could be proved to be, what culture snobs you could make of the hardest-headed men worth millions. And he gave chapter and verse for everything, sparing no one. The Louvre taken in by the so-called Miter of Tissaphernes, that lovely work of art they bought so that the little Italian jeweler who had made it could have gone on to live in affluence, if only the foolish fence, who sold it to the museum, hadn’t given him so outrageously little of the real price that the poor little fellow blabbed. The famous Santa Barbara in that church near the piazza at Venice before which there were always a couple of rows of rich Americans and other nationals sitting sighing, when, for the last ten years of its success, what they had been gaping at was the copy a clever forger had substituted. The Hermes of Praxiteles, now proved to be a vulgar Roman copy, put up when those Middle Westerners of the ancient world looted the original. I was absorbed not only because of the debunking, for I doubt if then I cared a damn for beauty save as an escape from work, but because I suddenly saw a way out. The Midwest wouldn’t keep me for being its natural better, too delicate and refined to work. All right, I must work; but here I could work, and not too hard, and get all I wanted.
After the lecture I went up to the lecturer. He was willing enough to go on talking. The reception had been very cold, and he was longing for someone to whom he could relieve his feelings about the American clubwoman. Of course I was flattered, and my spite pleased, too, and of course it wasn’t difficult to get him to go on and tell me more about frauds. After a little while and not a little rye whiskey—his palate certainly wasn’t sensitive—he began to drop hints that he soon would be able to leave this dishonest racket of lecturing to boobs for something much more lucrative. “One’s almost sorry to screw a few hundred dollars out of such suckers as these audiences. The men who need wringing and are easier to strip are the big-buying millionaires who want to make collections. There’s the market.”
Then he became a bit secretive as to plans and, when I pushed, showed considerable wariness. I guessed he was just getting in on some big art racket, but he had been drinking long enough to be able to keep his mouth from giving away more than quite vague boasts of the big fish he would soon be landing. Still, just to show me he wasn’t being gaseous drunk, he did mention what was to prove as valuable to me—a great deal about methods.
The long and the short of it was that I went to art school. Oh, I was full of promise. I learned to be a fine copyist and then got a scholarship to study in the big galleries. That’s quite easy work for anyone with talent, and I had some of that. I turned out oleographic reproductions of great masters, all the outline and general tone and, of course, not a single stroke of the magic. I went on, for now I felt the prize wasn’t too far away. I was sent to Europe and worked in those galleries. I even sold a picture or two to dealers of the shadier sort, who, from hints they dropped, were evidently ready to employ me as one of their forgery hacks. But, no sir, I wasn’t going to be caught like a Chinese cormorant, made to land fish and then disgorge them for my trainer. I was ready now for my next step. I got my scholarship extended so that I could make a trip through Britain and not only copy in the galleries but also visit the big private collections of a number of peers. I had my plans all worked out now. I’d actually met one or two men in the trade on their own. The procedure was quite simple. You gained access to a house to make a copy, paying a fee for the courtesy. You copied away day after day till they were tired of fussing about you. Then one day you worked on the frame, not on the picture-copy. Soon after that, you were finished and said good-by. How did one get the original through the United States customs? Why, by what one may call the reverse process. You had made an old master and left that behind, and on the original, which you brought away with you, you put a thin over-painting of your own strokes. You showed the customs what they naturally took to be a copy, while underneath, and to reappear with almost as few strokes of cleaning, was the old master to be sold to some millionaire who certainly wouldn’t be too precise in asking whence it came, any more than you would be in asking where his millions came from. So I’d become a skilled cleaner? Yes, I’d become quite keen, quite professional in my job, almost liked it for itself, this stripping of suckers. Oh, yes, specialization pays: cracksmen must be craftsmen and cultured, to boot. I was one farther on than Raffles and the swell mobs-men.
Then this place came on my horizon. I’d heard vaguely about it: that it was unfished water, as you might say, and that in it lay a fat trout or two. No, no, not this church and that—that object. I hadn’t heard of that. I was too highly specialized in pictures, where the big money lay, and the steady market. It was Saxlin Abbey I was determined to get into, not this scrap of a place of worship. Most of my crowd knew about the Abbey, but they couldn’t get in—that is, for the long slow sit that was necessary to land the fish. Of course, they could have made a break in, as—pardon me—you’ve made. But you know as well as I, no doubt, that all you could do with this objet d’art would be to break it up and sell the jewels for a very low percentage of what the complete work of art would fetch if you could sell it whole. If, indeed, you could, for, of course, these pieces have their own notoriety insurance. You just can’t sell them because all the world of art knows where they come from. Still, of course, I agree with you—how closely the end of this story will show—that when a piece is, as it were, as much at large as this which is now flashing and glowing at us, well, it’s worth-while just snatching it, break
ing it up, and cashing in on the fragments; the ruby alone should pay for the trouble, even with the fence’s ruinous deductions. This must have some other defense, and to that problem we’ll get in a little. But with pictures, of course, it’s quite otherwise. You can’t sell them in snippets, or get something decent for the frame and another tidy sum for the bare canvas and a third for the coats of paint.
Saxlin Abbey is an amusing set-up. First, there’s the place, itself a vast piece of loot. One of those self-made gangsters of the sixteenth century (when you made a fortune and gained a step in the peerage every time you changed your religion to suit your new ruler), one of that sort of man, got this as one of his first prizes: a splendid Cistercian House complete with gardens and fish ponds and every other convenience of the day and enough land and rests and mining rights going with it to start one nicely toward millionairehood. And as the centuries rolled on and royalties and rents rolled in, art was collected. In the eighteenth century the Grand Tour was regularly made by the rising young heir, and he brought back more and more loot from a famished Italy. Finally the young marquis of the day—he had come into his title as a boy—had himself painted in a fine allegorical piece by Tiepolo in Venice. He was Alexander, and the Venetian lady who was detaining him among the lagoons appears as the wife of Darius pleading before the conqueror. Of course, by the time art was being taken up to its Ph.D. publicity level and ceasing to be a rather private taste of the very rich, the oncoming rumbles of Ruskin, and before him the Gothic revival and the Prince Consort, all made Tepolo something to be ashamed of: no one could be such a master of representationalism and yet be possessed of any real genius. Why, it’s only in my lifetime that he’s begun to sell big. Curious how blind “good taste” makes us. For who can doubt that, though he is the last word in many ways, the creative word was still speaking to that last syllable of art’s recorded time: the canon never closes.