by H. F. Heard
Forgive me. Let’s go back to common ground, to those two words “sell big.” I was going to get that Tiepolo. But, would you believe it, when I inquired, I was told it couldn’t even be viewed. Why, even the man who had catalogued it in the last big work on Tiepolo hadn’t seen it and had to trust a very poor mezzotint made shortly after it had been landed in England. For that was the next amusing thing about Saxlin Abbey: the inhabitant of this huge piece of religious loot, the duke (for the family did succeed in touching the top of the peerage pyramid). The surviving specimen of this genealogical adventure looked like one of the rather more blunted of the rodents. I doubt if he had had as much reaction to his environment as most of them can display. For, if they don’t, they die; while in our unique form of life, the community went on paying him literally hundreds of thousands of pounds because, some ten ancestors back, one of his forebears had actually stolen a large part of communal property and, five ancestors after, another had taken the common lands away from the common people by enclosure acts. Surely it is written, “To him that hath shall be given.” Of course, that inerrant dictum does not say that this compound interest may not be just as much damnation as salvation. Being treated like that has made the very simple brain inside the not very appealing body believe, a natural reaction, that it is very important—surely, he has proof enough? And to show his importance (again his powers deny him any other proof), he forbids anyone ever to see anything he has. Not for him the simple crude ideas of display that some of his fellow peers display. No, he will let no one see what he himself doesn’t want to look at. There is a kind of completeness in that frustration that has about it a certain finish.
And all this story, which I found was quite true, just whetted my appetite. I was determined that not only would I view the prize; I would get away with it. I got my wooden horse into that Troy, as it were, through a tunnel. I found I must make friends with the butler. Have you studied that, the unique British, variety of Homo sapiens? It is the one incomparable contribution made by the English to mankind. Their colonels can be found so closely imitated by those of other armies that you can see the English is only itself a copy of some other original, probably the Prussian or the French. Their admirals have emerged in America, as you know, now that America is the big-navy nation. But their butlers—there they were permitted to make something that may be admired but never really copied. And these men make their inferiors and their superiors. They strike, from their wonderful point of vantage, both up and down. The whole of servantdom, all the lower orders, quail before them. But so do the upper classes. They hold, from their central position, the whole realm in their large silver-polishing hands. Consummate actors who believe with their whole hard hearts in their great part, they make a massive pattern of living which no one dares disobey. On the side they build up big fortunes: the tribute paid them by tradesmen, the equally large fees paid as tips by the lesser aristocracy, who would stand well in their eyes. But, be it allowed, money is only what they look on as their due. It is rank they care for. And they are the conductors of the orchestra of snobbery; everyone from first violin to triangle obeys their batons. They appear bland and massive but their eyes see everything: the wrong knife used by a guest, that a thrice-polished glass is not clean, that silver could be brighter, the wrong cut of a vest, excess of deference, and, equally, the lack of it. I don’t mean to be blasphemous, but sometimes the tremendous quotation from Job, “Lo, he put no trust in his servants; he accuses his angels of folly” comes into my mind when I think of butlers. These men prevent both revolution—the masses can never rise as long as such an eye is turned on them—and progress—the men at the top dare not move for fear they would be left by their staff and mentor because they had shown poor taste. Of course, you realize that such men are not mere stuffed shirts. They are hard, of course, but they have the first qualification for enlightenment, as well as the first requirement for great acting: they are realists. They know what they are doing: they can sit back even from their most intimate creation—themselves. That is the real source of their power as of all power. They are real; they know what they want and how it is to be got, while above and below them they have those who don’t know, who are fundamentally uncertain.
J. M. Barrie nearly saw to the heart of this British secret when he wrote The Admirable Crichton, but not quite. My discovery, and I think it was one, was a dual realization: first, that such a man would have his master in his hands. That was obvious, perhaps. But the deduction, not quite so: that such a man, being really able, would be bored. Butlers are more alone than anyone: they really have no colleagues. Like great plain-clothes detectives, each has to work alone and can never unbend, least of all should he meet one of his own rank. I found that the butler who reigned at Saxlin Abbey was bored. The creature he managed, telling it what it should wear, how feed, when sleep, was, after all, scarcely worth the trouble of taming.
There is, you may know, a series of those small luxury brooks around here called chalk streams. They give to man the last, final, undercut expression and exercise of the lust to hunt, master, and trap. For they are or were the ambulatories of the very rich, clever men, lawyers and such folk, who must have solitude and skill and outdoor walking and vigilance and the power to prey, all combined. They used to pay huge sums for a few hundred yards of such right to pace and cast alongside one of the exactly right trout streams. They are an interesting tribe, the dry-fly fishers. Every power can be exercised exquisitely. The prowl: for if your shadow falls on the bright water, lit like crystal from the white chalk floor, the wary antagonist, who moves like an iridescent shadow in the shallow layer of liquid, will never rise to your offer of a duel. The choice of “fly”: those fantastic pieces of vivid silk and bright hair, which neither you nor, it seems, the fish, thinks is a fly, but which is rather the gauge of battle, or hawk-lure. You have to be something of a psychological artist to guess at the trout’s esthetic mood that day, that hour. And if you are really great in this submicroscopic art you not only tie your own flies, you invent new ones.
I like to think now that the soundest of such fantastic sub-inventions or, as ladies say of hats, “creations,” is called after its designer, Greenwell’s Glory. It was devised by a Canon of Durham Cathedral. I know nothing else of his intellectual or moral powers. But he did live till ninety, I believe, and for most of the time, I have heard, drew a steady, almost untaxed income of some ten thousand pounds a year from mining royalties—that is, from miners working in fetid and dangerous darkness far under the choir where he dozed and died unquestioned. He had to be paid because his cathedral happened to be sitting on the spot where, thousands of feet below, the coal seams lay and had lain for millions of years. I often wonder whether he was reincarnated as a trout, perhaps one of those voluntary blind fish in the vast underground Kentucky Caverns; it would have been an apt reversal. Who knows, perhaps all the while he fiddled with making sham flies while real men died far under his feet the Master Mind was teaching him by parable the way of the devil with the soul. So that in another life, from the fish’s standpoint, he might try again.
Then there’s the beautiful power of casting, that huge but easy and gracious stroke, in which the whole cramped body can stretch itself. But, at the same time, it must be so perfect and light a stretch that it’s more a form of flying. For the fly must fall, or alight, on the water so gently that not the slightest ripple spreads: it’s a kind of gentle expiration. And if done to admiration, then the trout rises and accepts your challenge and you enter the second act, when he may punish you by smashing your twenty-guinea rod and taking your precious and prized fly, or you may, after a prodigiously protracted and delicate duel, land him.
But I mustn’t run on—“What a piece of work is man!” And my butler was a dry-fly fisher. That’s why I know all about it. Indeed, the great Fisher of men nearly caught me, I believe, on that fly and would have, I think, but that he had another in his book with which he did land me. I dressed my part and, in order to get
to know the major-domo, had taken to fishing near where he paced out the moments, free from his almost royal imprisonment. My part, though close to his, was, need I say, where the stream had deteriorated as rated by the dry-fly art. So I got it cheap. Luck; I thought, to be close to the really first-rate section which the butler had pre-empted as his perquisite from his captive employer, who, of course, owned everything around the place. He soon saw that I was both keen and callow. After some days of looking at me with a face in which no shadow of interest appeared, he came up and said, “You have a good rod, but, if you wish, I could show you how to cast on that piece of water.” Few men can resist, if they are really capable, the temptation to show an anxious fool how to do what they can. I was a good pupil. I was out of his world: just a traveling young man, deferential, amusing. You’ know the way people will tell to strangers in the train things they conceal from all their families.
Within a week he was talking, more to himself than to me, about the Abbey. Then things went straight. I believe it was he—at least I’m sure he thought it was—who suggested that he should show me over. “HIS Grace,” as he called the Duke—and with such emphasis on the HIS that the initial aspirate always seemed in danger of being blown away and a big “D” of forming in its place; certainly the ducal grace had in the butler’s eyes nothing to do with graciousness—HIS Grace was to be sent off shortly to kill some sort of bird in some particular place. Her Ladyship was hardly ever at home. So it was that I found myself at last actually in front of the Tiepolo. And it was superb: those scumbled, sunset, lagoon-underlit skies; those skeins of flamingo glow over the pale, cold, green areas of heaven. And the foreground figures as splendid. The dying glory of the sunset lending a hectic, feverish tint to the young conqueror’s flush of victory—both to fade and sink into oncoming night. The last beams flashing on his gilded and jeweled harness making it look frail as tin foil. And, another sort of foil to his transitory magnificence; the pleading woman in her somber velvets and sheen of silks, her face deathly pale toward the rising moon. The poignant transitoriness of it all—the picture of a triumph lasting no longer than the afterglow that lit it.
To get to copying it took longer, though. HIS Grace had to come and go twice. And twice, quite casually, about one hundred pounds under various guises—partly presents, partly cash—had to go from me to that vast personage, who showed no reaction either as he received “honoraria” or conveyed information and leave. It was finally managed that I should be admitted to do some necessary repairs: touch up the gesso on the cornices, restore some of the huge, Venetian baroque, gilt picture frames. It was slow work, but at last I was hard at work. And, when I’d produced just enough to show my employer that I really could paint, I stopped that, and as his outward order and covering excuse was that I was told to work on the frame, you bet I did. Then I worked to put my substitute in. Thank heaven, it was in a vile light and had glass over it, but when I left I must say I quailed as I took a last glance at the sham sentry I had mounted to keep watch while I got clear. Still the more I looked at the two—my conscientious daub and that thing of light and glow, of living youth and dying sunset—what could I do about it? You see, in the end I actually caught an artistic conscience.
Believe me, I spent more work on that forgery of mine than on any I’d made, though it was to stand in a safer, more neglected place than any that held my workmanship. I just couldn’t rise to the height of the opportunity to display such utter impudence. Yes, I see you guess there must have been some sort of change going on in me already, to have made a practiced hand go squeamish, all over a bit of decadent Venetian art, which to any man of mettle was, of course, just so much cold cash. Maybe you’re right, but still I’m not sure. Just let me finish and then you can judge better. The way I like to put it (for I’d really been caught already by that other fine art, dry-fly fishing): I say to myself that the hidden Angler up there above the bank and over the surface of the shallow bright water, which I, dumb fish, took to be the whole of the world, had begun to make his second cast at me. I had taken to going to church, as I stayed on in the village and became a species of naturalized inhabitant. My mentor liked me to do so. He once told me that he was “a fervent supporter of the Establishment,” though perhaps his notion of fervency might have seemed Laodicean to those who usually use the word. Indeed, he himself explained his position on another occasion, in a phrase between two casts at a particularly wary trout, which, when we landed it, had a profile much like his own: “The Establishment” was “a bulwark against the rabble.”
Then one Sunday there was to be Communion after the Morning Service, and, as the Ante-Communion service is then put in as part of matins, the vessels were on the altar. It was then that I saw this for the first time. I suppose I’d heard of it. They were all proud of it. But like a cobbler I stuck to my last. Besides, what could I do with that sort of thing? As I’ve said, the straight and big market in my crooked trade was pictures: paint and canvas, not goldsmith work and jewels. Even if I knew how to copy it, where’d I land it, when I had made the copy and given this little church a new lamp for the old, as in the Aladdin tale? I could only hope to break it up and get 1 per cent of its real wealth and worth.
But, as the service murmured along like a very quiet stream, that bright thing up on the altar kept catching my eye. It fascinated me. You can understand. Yes, and you’ll understand even better in a few moments. It hooked me just with its dazzle, as a trout is taken by the flash of the sham fly. For, of course, I didn’t know a thing about it, even archaeologically. When we came out, I asked casually about it. I was told it was kept just as you how see it, in this little side chapel that links the parsonage and the church. As they all said: it was safer thus than in a safe. It was too well known, the Saxlin Treasure, for anyone even to try to steal. That was true enough. It had been in the church no one knew how long. The Reformation had respected it. During the Commonwealth it had probably been buried by the parish—as other such treasures were, here and there, at that time. My own guess is that it was brought here by one of the Greek Freemasons who traveled through this part of Britain. The medieval word for “mason” is “Lathamos”—the Greek word, you see. And there are a couple of capitals in the church, through that door, which are as Byzantine as those in the well-known, well-authenticated church at Nottingham. No, it was a pretty wild thought to get away with that by what I may call aboveboard robbery.
And then a month after—for my appetite had grown into a real covetousness for this bright thing, and I’d had to lay off from my Tiepolo, for HIS Grace was back for one of his home visits—when I was in Church again and the menu was once more “Morning Prayer and Ante-Communion Service,” there was my lure winking at me, challenging me. And it was a professional challenge—you see, of course. Why couldn’t I invent a new technique for landing, or rather for releasing, objets d’art, instead of going on through all my life using this well-tried method of getting away with paintings only?
It came to me in a flash, during the sermon. Of course, one could substitute here as well as anywhere else. I can remember the very subject the old man was slowly and almost inaudibly developing: he was preaching on “Innocency being the true Wisdom.” “Well,” I thought to myself with a comfortable smile, “you don’t know what your soothing mumble has helped one of your congregation to think out and, you old innocent, you never will.” I had the whole neat little scheme worked through before we rose as he turned and intoned the ascription, “And now.…” “And now,” I said to myself, “all that remains for you is to execute the foolproof plan.”
First I ran up to London—the Monday after my revelation during the sermon. I headed for that odd district called Soho. To most people, British as well as tourists, it consists solely of bright little restaurants of various “continental cuisines.” It has, though, its northern quarter, very dreary and a bit forbidding. I wonder if you know it? There live some of the finest craftsmen in Europe. The top people do superb repair work for the grea
t private collectors and the smaller museums. They can mend Meissen porcelains so that that lens of yours would be needed to trace the original fracture lines, touch up a scarred Fra Angelico panel so that the holy Fratre himself would not suspect that any brush had touched it since his, re-fuse the broken lip of a Murano glass goblet so that even the refraction of the crystallo seems undisturbed, cook a piece of stained glass, giving it the necessary patina and horny iridescence, till it can be fitted into a gap left by a piece that’s fallen out, say, of one of the great York Minster windows, and not an expert can tell! But I needn’t show further proof why my steps went to one of those streets. It’s a borderland profession, a delicate, dangerous trade, without a doubt. An honest pretense all too easily turns into pretentious dishonesty. Indeed, the game is so close to ours that, not unnaturally, I had come across such a decadent, though when first I met him I never thought he would come in so useful. We’d simply exchanged a few secrets, just to give proof that we were tough guys of the latest fashion. Well, from him I got my supplies of that useful copper-aluminum alloy, which doesn’t tarnish and works, and of course looks, like gold. Also a set of those synthetic jewels, which the modern electric furnace and a few simple chemical formulae make really as well as ever Nature made her “raw” gems. I also got a promise that for a fixed sum he’d finish off my rough replica when I should bring it to him (we kept up appearances, of course, and each knew enough of the other to be in no danger of being stool-pigeoned) “on my way back with it to the States to present this charming copy to a new cathedral church.”