Yes, the fact was undoubted. Craine found it interesting. London was full of markets that didn’t figure in the Financial Times, and some of them were fascinating to keep an eye on. Was Weidle up to one of his games? The old man’s resources weren’t enormous – he was no Duveen – and Craine knew how he enjoyed putting his shirt on a thing. What had he got in the farther room? Commonly it was eighteenth-century English portraits or landscapes, with Reynolds or Gainsborough or Richard Wilson authentically present to set the tone. You hardly ever saw modern painting there. It was possible to suspect that Weidle had never met a living painter in twenty years, unless of the trade-fallen kind that had turned to restoring and copying. He was old enough to have fought the whole move to make contemporary works top-of-the-market commodities. Craine respected him for that. It was sound commercial sense. Persuade folk into paying the moon for great pictures by the incomparable Senor Negresco or Monsieur Le Blanc, and presently Negresco and Le Blanc will be asking answering prices for plates and pots splashed with pigment as they trundle past on a conveyor belt. Well, good luck to them. When the market comes unstuck through their industry, let the dealers take the knock if they’ve been foolish enough to buy heavily. Which, hitherto, Weidle hadn’t been.
Craine peered into the inner room. His first impression was of its having been hit by a bomb or in some other way demolished. There was nothing but piles of rubble. But they were all – of course they were all – on canvas. The rubble was unnaturally chunky and unnaturally harmonious. Somewhere in each canvas there would be a rectangular lump of stone the proportions of which had been conscientiously played upon through the whole design. To a seasoned eye the effect was comical. But Craine couldn’t bring himself to laugh. He thought of the obsessed young man – whoever he might be – who had for months and years pursued this luckless vision. But why had Weidle taken him up and filled a room with him? The answer wasn’t far to seek. For the moment Weidle was conducting his exhibitions on economical principles.
And here he was. All silver hair and elderly élan, Fyodor Weidle emerged from his private room. But whence, more remotely, had he come? He had certainly been at Christ Church. There were people who remembered him there; and he still wore from time to time a tie with the little cardinal’s hats used by that modest college to dissimulate the fact that it is a royal foundation. As an undergraduate he had possessed a number of icons which were asserted to be notable; there was a story that his father had been brought from hyperborean regions to form a collection of such things for Prince Schwarzenberg. Beyond this, not much was known about Weidle. His business astuteness was staggering. Craine had heard informed people speak of him as a man of the strictest personal honour. It didn’t, this, strain credulity. As one who could keep a good many balls in air simultaneously, Weidle carried conviction at once.
“Aha – so you’ve come for your lady?” Weidle shook hands. “I’m not surprised. An admirable Amico.”
“My dear Weidle, Amico is no longer allowed to have existed. Your young man says the lady’s a Raffaellino.”
“Well, well – what if she is? The important thing, surely, is that she’s amichevole herself. And she’s been looking out for you, Craine. I’ll swear I’ve caught her at it. A wistful turn of the head. Moreover she knows, the sly baggage, that I’ll take what you mentioned in your letter.”
“Then that’s capital.” Craine wasted no more words on this. “But what are you up to here?” He glanced at the walls. “A new departure, isn’t it? And they haven’t the advantage of turning a wistful eye on a possible buyer.”
As if he hadn’t been aware of them before, Weidle looked from one expanse of pictured rubble to another. “You blocks,” he murmured, “you stones, you worse than senseless things.” Then he raised a quick hand, as if deprecating his own irreverence. “A most promising chap. A little restricted as to range, so far – but I’ve no doubt that will come. A wonderful sense of mass, wouldn’t you say? Look at the one in the centre. Positively weighs you down.”
“Quite so.”
“And one owes something to the younger people. The mighty dead are all very well. But one should give a hand, from time to time, to poor devils who still face the grim business of keeping themselves alive.”
Craine didn’t pretend not to be amused. He knew Weidle quite well enough for that. “Isn’t it a realisation that you’ve come to a little late in your career?”
Weidle made a charming gesture. “Of course,” he said, “you would guess. Call it a phase of concentration in the policy of my firm. Or say, less grandly, that I’m tipping my eggs into one basket.” He paused, and gave Craine the lightest of glances. But Craine, with his days given to negotiation, knew when he was being weighed up. He was no more than a small collector, and he was puzzled by his sharp sense of being the subject of intense calculation. “Perhaps,” Weidle went on, “you’ve time for a dish of tea?”
“I’ll be delighted.” Weidle’s tea was famous. Sipping it, one supposed it must have travelled by camel even on its last stage down Oxford Street. “And perhaps somebody could ring up the office for my car? I’m going to drive that picture straight down to Pinn.”
“Then come in.” And Weidle led the way to his inner room. “I hope,” he said as he opened the door, “that Mrs. Craine is well?”
Craine made no reply. He had stopped dead on the threshold. As usual in the middle of Weidle’s room there was an easel. It generally carried what was reckoned to be the gem of his collection at the moment. Today, the canvas was a large one: a full-length painting of a man in a blue blouse, sitting on a high stool, with his hands resting idly on his knees. “Good Lord!” Craine cried. “It’s an Arnander!”
Weidle was beside him. “It is Arnander,” he said gently. “And I’d call it one of the great self-portraits of the world.”
Craine’s first and inconsequent reflection was about the Amico. It was delightful – but it wasn’t really worth lifting from one wall and transporting to another. It’s only what they call great art that is, in a strict judgment, art. And here one had it. Of course it was indeed of Arnander as well as by Arnander. He could recognise that now. He had never seen his wife’s first husband in the flesh. But photographs and Augustus John’s sketch would have given him the truth unassisted. He turned away from the canvas. Just for the moment, he’d had enough of it. “And anything more?” he asked.
“Actually here in this room?” Weidle turned and pointed easily to a painting stacked against the wall. “One you know, this time. The View from Cortona.”
It was certainly the View from Cortona.
“So it was you,” was it?” Craine asked. “And I suppose you got the La Verna too?”
Weidle nodded. “That’s in the strong-room – with some other things.”
“You were run up to a pretty stiff price for them.”
“Yes, indeed. But it couldn’t be helped.”
Craine wondered. If Weidle had already got hold of more Arnanders than anybody knew, he was quite capable of seeing to it that he had to give almost spectacular prices for two more. And here, certainly, was Weidle’s basket of eggs. It was to be a sort of corner in Arnanders. “I suppose,” Craine asked, “there isn’t such a large number, all told?”
“Not a considerable oeuvre. In fact, I shall hold quite a fair proportion of it. And I’ll make his reputation. As really one of the greatest, that’s to say. It all depends, you know, on the marketing.”
“Whether a painter is of the greatest?”
“No, no.” And Weidle waved an impatient hand. “Simply the speed and finality with which his recognition comes.”
“My wife,” Craine said rather dryly, “will be interested in what you’re up to.”
Weidle was at once gravely courteous. “Perhaps she’d care to come in one day – say next week?”
“Thank you – but we’re probably going abroad in a few days.” Craine turned back to the painting on the easel. He found that what he rather urgently sought whe
n confronted with it was a handy speculative approach. And one presented itself readily enough. A self-portrait of this stature was surely an illuminating special case amid the general run of artistic productions. It was the limiting instance, as it were, of the successful fusion of inner and outer vision. John Arnander had been gazing into a mirror – or probably a couple of mirrors – and building with everything therein revealed to sight and touch. But at the same time – it was impossible not to be convinced of this – he had been projecting upon his canvas the conclusions of a profound introspection. The result was a triumph. Yet how imperfect as any sort of act of communication must it necessarily be! The portrait must always and everywhere declare itself as a serious labour of art. But to Craine, to Weidle, to Jill it must bring experiences of marked diversity – and who could tell what this canvas had been to Arnander himself as he laid his palette by?
Weidle was standing beside him again. “Mrs. Craine won’t be acquainted with this one?” he asked.
Craine shook his head. He realised there were things Weidle wanted to know in the obscure history of the painter he proposed to set among the greatest. That was reasonable enough. But of course anything of the sort was Jill’s business. All that he need himself do was to declare that Arnander’s story contained nothing out of the way. It wasn’t wholly happy. It held for several people some painful bits. Reticence about the recently dead, and about their relations with the living, is the decent and civilised thing. But there wasn’t about Arnander, that he knew of, any strong prompting to sealed lips.
The tea came in and Weidle poured it. “What seems to me curious,” he said, “and also rather a shame – is the fact of your wife’s possessing so comparatively little herself. People will be surprised. There wasn’t, after all, exactly a clamouring market for Arnander’s work. And your wife, of course, is known to have been a woman of means.”
“She has the Maremma,” Craine said. “And not even this”—he nodded at the self-portrait—”would incline me to say the Maremma isn’t the best of the lot.”
“At least it’s the biggest.” Weidle was urbanely determined to resist any suggestion that the very finest Arnanders were not now his.
“And she has a good many drawings.”
“Ah – now, talking of drawings . . . “
As he said this, Weidle rose casually. He had spoken casually, too. And Craine – it was again the faculty negotiation had developed in him – knew at once that the crucial corner of some manoeuvre was being turned. Weidle had slipped from the room. Jill’s two husbands, Craine said to himself, are left to improve their acquaintance. He put down his cup and walked over to the easel. The portrait would probably disconcert Tim and Charles. They would be inclined to call the sort of person represented in it a drip. Or would they at once see beyond the fact that here was a pretty poor physical specimen? Craine didn’t know.
But he knew why this picture was neither better nor worse than the Maremma or the La Verna; why it was simply of the same order of art. Brilliantly sensuous, it was yet suprasensuous. Even as it exploited the senses it by-passed them – letting in something that they commonly sieved out. At bottom the thing was visionary. But it wasn’t in the least a mere ejaculation, a gasp, an o altitudo. It was a work of tremendous craft. Someone had likened the Maremma to late Turner. But that was entirely wrong. What remained the dominant characteristic of Arnander’s brief maturity was the immense painterly resource, the range and sureness of technical accomplishment. Even with the flame out, the tap turned off, Arnander would have been one of the perfect painters.
It wasn’t to advance such musings, presumably, that old Weidle had left the room. Craine looked at his watch. He was impatient to jump into his car and drive off to Jill. For the moment – he said to himself with one more glance at the painting – it’s an advantage that I have over that immortal thing. I can join Jill.
Weidle was back. He had half a dozen sheets of drawing- paper in his hand. They were small, and might have been torn from a sketch-book. “Look at these,” he said, and put them down on his desk.
Craine looked at them, one by one. The implication seemed to be that they were Arnander’s work. But they didn’t look like that to him. “I don’t make much of them,” he said.
“You’ve seen nothing of the sort before?”
Craine shook his head. They were exiguous drawings done with a thick black lead. For the most part they seemed to do no more than sketch uncertain arabesques. Here and there, perhaps, they hinted a volume, essayed to define a form. “You think they’re by Arnander?” he asked.
Weidle nodded. He was looking not at the sketches but intently at Craine. And Craine found this irksome. “Well, even if they are,” he said, “I don’t see that they’re of the slightest interest or value.”
“Value? It’s not in question.” Weidle spoke with a flash of impatience. “You don’t think I go peddling stuff out of people’s waste-paper baskets, do you? But interest – that’s another matter.”
“How do you know they’re Arnander’s? What’s their provenance?”
Weidle shrugged his shoulders. “They haven’t any – worth speaking of. They came to me for an opinion, an expertise. Well, I’ve studied and I’ve compared. It’s my opinion they’re by Arnander.”
“I see.” Craine knew that Weidle, unlike many of his kind, spoke in such matters with authority. He looked again at the sketches. “But, dash it all,” he burst out, “they’re all wrong!”
Weidle nodded. “He didn’t go off his head? Something didn’t go slowly soft in his brain?”
“Nothing of the sort.”
“It sometimes happens. For instance, it happened with Utrillo.” Weidle picked up one of the sketches and turned it over and over. “I’m enquiring about the paper,” he said.
Craine was puzzled. “What the devil are you after, Weidle?”
“Nothing I haven’t a fair claim to know. But you must snub me, of course, if I’m being tiresome. Would your wife resent my seeking information?”
“You have only to put your questions to her, and you’ll get your answer.”
Weidle accepted this for the ambiguity it was. He shrugged his shoulders; it was a gesture, one fancied, he had deliberately allowed himself to inherit from his father, the henchman of Prince Schwarzenberg. “I am unforgivable,” he murmured urbanely. “Will you have more tea?”
Although he wanted to be off, Craine passed his cup. He might as well find out, if he could, just what was in Weidle’s head. “As you know,” he said, “John Arnander died in the mid-forties. So we’re talking about fairly long-past history. As far as I’m concerned, it’s scarcely even that. I never met him. And my wife doesn’t talk about him a great deal.”
“She wasn’t with him during the last six months, or thereabouts, of his life?”
“No. They were all right in Italy during the earlier part of the war. Various things helped – Jill’s possessing American citizenship, knowing the Princess of Piedmont, and so forth. The Italians themselves tended to have a comfortable eighteenth-century slant on what constituted an enemy. But when it appeared that the Germans would probably come down, Arnander insisted on getting her out of the country. He was absolutely right, for things did eventually, as you know, get pretty grim. Jill had her baby, and was already carrying her second child. What happened to him in the succeeding months, I’ve never heard properly sorted out. But eventually the Fifth Army came up with him, and he was given a job. He’s said to have died while trying to save one of the finest bridges in Italy. It was a pretty good end.”
“Decidedly.” Weidle took a turn about the room. “Of course I know how their home was bombed and a lot of his work destroyed. An appalling disaster, that. It’s the later period that seems obscure. He got his wife and child away. But what then? Was he in hiding? One supposes it must have come to that. But what about the conditions? Could he paint under them? And, if he could, is there no doubt about his being fit to?”
Craine got to his
feet. “You seem to come back to that. I repeat that there’s not the slightest reason to suppose that he was off his rocker, or anything of the sort. If he was physically fit, he may well have kept on painting.”
“They sometimes paint when they’re not that.” Weidle gave this the air of a rather shocking communication. “You remember A Second Innings?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It was one of Mark Lambert’s last short stories. It’s about a painter called Ainger. He isn’t represented as of any consequence; he’s just a pompous old donkey of an R.A. He’d made his pile – which was what he’d been born to do- – long ago; and for years and years he’d painted nothing at all. Then something went wrong with his inside – lungs or liver or lights, we’re not told. His relatives packed him off to a clinic. It’s a high-class, Magic Mountain sort of place, very entertainingly described. Through years of senile idleness Ainger had been a terrible pest – maidservants couldn’t be kept in the house, and so forth – so they were all thoroughly glad to be rid of him. Something over a year later, he died. The family went out to Switzerland or wherever for the funeral. They found a studio absolutely stuffed with masterpieces.”
Craine laughed. “Really with masterpieces?”
“Good Lord, no. Just with the familiar Ainger stuff, as it had been piously represented for thirty years in all the municipal art galleries of England. The tale ends with a girl, Ainger’s grand-daughter, who wants to paint, sitting among all these things helplessly, while the snow falls softly outside.”
“Clearly a very amusing story. That was how his approaching dissolution took its hero – a phrenetic return to professional activity?”
“Just that. Maidservants no longer deflected his energies, and various other distractions were happily out of the way. So he piled up canvases as he never had before. In the story, of course, it’s represented as a little more than that – as a sort of fever that was a natural concomitant of the particular morbid process his body was harbouring. I’ve sometimes thought that Lambert’s story may have given a hint to Thomas Mann.”
A Use of Riches Page 4