The auctioneers of the 1929 sale operated from a steel and glass skyscraper on 36th Street. Harold was given an extremely good lunch there by one of the partners, and looked out over the Jersey shore to the marshes beyond as he drank coffee afterwards. The auctioneers were able to help him considerably, supplying him with the names of all those who had bought pictures at the sale.
“I’m most grateful,” said Harold, as he left.
“It’s been a pleasure, Mr Barlow.”
Americans always expressed their pleasure at having been of assistance. It was both pleasing and unexpected, somehow. Harold had been taught to think of Americans as cut-and-thrust businessmen with little time for social graces. In practice he found them better mannered than the British. It was just one of a number of readjustments he had to make.
The biggest of these was to his sense of scale. As he followed the trail of the pictures across America he could hardly fail to notice the sheer size of the country, nor the enormous variety of landscape. America was not only big, it was also beautiful, as he discovered from long train-journeys through snow-stilled Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and Wisconsin on his way to Minneapolis; from air-trips to St Louis and Boston; from drives along the roads designed for driving to Washington and Cleveland.
The process of discovering the pictures led him to discover a good deal about America, too. The sameness of which some Americans spoke—identical hamburger stands beside identical freeways—did not depress him with its supposed conformity: on the contrary, after the wildness and, by European standards, sparse habitation of America, it was something of a relief to an alien to find something he could think of as “typical” amidst so much variety. Suspecting that Americans might think him perverse in this, he made the mental reservation that Americans might be pleased by pubs as such, in the same way that he was pleased by hamburger stands. It wasn’t an aesthetic question at all: more, perhaps, of a process of adaptation.
Of the sixteen original portraits, seven were now in museums, besides the two in Cincinnati. The Fogg at Cambridge, Massachusetts, had a Van Dyck, for instance, and Harold had an excuse to spend two days looking round Harvard, frozen picturesquely along the Charles, its modern versions of the New England classical style splendid against the hard grey skies. He was reminded strongly of Oxford, and felt rather pointless and old among the throngs of young Americans, all more serious and eager than he and his undergraduate friends had ever been. He was taken to Concord and Lexington, where the American revolution began, and felt strangely embarrassed that the English should ever have behaved so badly, and that his hosts should assume so easily that these frozen fields and the snowbound river would merely interest him. They were interesting, it was true: but he felt isolated and alone again, standing on the tiny bridge at Concord, observing the statue of the American hero, the grave of the first British casualty, a gentle slope the other side of the river, Hawthorne’s and Emerson’s Old Manse so close by, dark and forbidding and alien. But it was he that was alien, and conscious of his descent from the enemy, he was ashamed that England had, not for the last time, been a foolish and incompetent aggressor. Occasionally Americans would make oblique remarks about Suez, and though Harold had been firmly and loudly against it at the time, attending the Trafalgar Square rally and marching against the Whitehall Cavalry, now he felt responsible for his country’s acts—or at least their unwilling victim and representative. He had never been particularly conscious of his Englishness before, but Boston made him uncomfortable, with all its relics of the great revolution against Harold’s country. It was little solace to feel sure that he would have been on the right side at the time. The time was over, and all Englishmen had to bear the marks of shame.
In other cities he felt better. Washington, with its straight streets and massive government marble everywhere, was phrenetic with preparations for the political conventions, for this was election year. The burning of the White House during the war of 1812 was considered rather a joke, anyway. The Potomac rolled gravely past the marmoreal shrines to Lincoln and Jefferson, absorbed with more important considerations. Chicago was bitterly cold, without a trace of Al Capone. Gravely disappointed at finding no speakeasies, he reflected that America was probably more mythical to most Europeans than real. Like most Englishmen, he had never really accepted that Prohibition had been repealed (in fact before he was born), and to find liquor readily available was something of a shock. Minneapolis, which had no English connections at all that Harold knew of (unlike Chicago, whose mayor once threatened to punch King George V on the nose, presumably being unaware that time had passed since George III), was curiously like North Oxford or the Victorian middle-class area of any English town. Huge Scandinavian houses lined the streets, and in them lived eminent professors. It was even colder than Chicago.
By the time Harold had assembled the basic material of a report to Mr Dangerfield, he considered himself an expert on the American city. He was very much in favour of properly heated houses and hotels, very bored with the endlessly repeated grid street-plan, and longing desperately for spring. His researches established that the seven pictures not in museums were all still in private American hands, except one, which had been burnt in a fire in Fargo, North Dakota. He did not feel obliged to go and check the ashes. Of the remaining six, three were on the east coast, one in Texas, one in Denver, and the last, the Hilliard miniature, in California. At least, it had last been heard of in California, having been sold to a Mr Carter Washburn in Los Angeles. Harold received no reply to any of the letters of inquiry he sent after it: he supposed that it had probably disappeared. Mr Washburn was dead, in all likelihood, and in any case he would absolutely certainly have moved since 1937: all Americans moved a good deal, but west coast Americans, he gathered, could hardly keep still from one day to the next. There seemed little chance of tracing either Mr Washburn or the picture.
Of the east coast pictures, he had succeeded in buying two for Mr Dangerfield. Mrs Moore, indeed a rich lady who lived in Virginia, was so impressed by Harold’s story of the Dangerfields’ decline and resurrection that she wanted to give her picture back to the family.
She lived in a very attractive colonial house near Charlottesville, with a view of the Blue Ridge. White pillars stood at the front, as in pictures, and the slave-quarters had been turned into a double-garage. The snow was melting fast as Harold drove from Washington to see Mrs Moore, and he was astonished by the bright red earth and the deep blue shadows in the dwindling patches of snow. The countryside was gently rolling and rather English, but for the astonishing redness of the earth, almost jarring against the green of the scant winter grass.
From her porch Mrs Moore could see Monticello, the house Jefferson had built for himself, and she insisted on taking Harold to see it, and the University, laid out by Jefferson with all the expansiveness of a medieval almshouse-builder. Around this attractive old campus the new buildings clustered, and Harold was forcibly reminded of how his own university had solved the problem of getting up to date by sending all scientists to the far end of the city. Being away from England made him, he discovered, much more critical of it. Besides, there was a lot to be said for old Southern architecture: good proportions, and a certain modesty without abstinence, were highly attractive. He thought of some of the vulgarly large and coarse mansions of the same period in England: the smallness of Monticello contrasted favourably with—but that was to be unfair. The leaders of the American revolution were not men of enormous wealth.
Mrs Moore, though, was a woman of enormous wealth.
“You see, it’s like this, Mr Barlow,” she said. “My grandmother—that’s on my mother’s side, of course—was from Boston. And her mother was e anti-slavery movement. A passionate leader, Mr Barlow.”
“Yes, Mrs Moore.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. I have never been quite easy in my mind, Mr Barlow. This is a big country, and South and North have a lot to forgive each other for, and things get forgotten.”
Harold had no idea of what she was driving at. He tried to look intelligent.
“Now this here picture you say is a Reynolds——”
“Allegedly,” said Harold, quickly.
“Well, allegedly or not allegedly, I guess it belongs back with the family that’s descended from the man in it. You might say that’s my Southern side. Now here’s my Northern side. My Northern side says I should get paid for the picture, but it also says that maybe I’m rich enough already.” She sighed. “We Americans can get kind of mixed-up, Mr Barlow, at times.”
He made a sympathetic noise.
“You read about the demonstrations, Mr Barlow?”
“Which demonstrations, Mrs Moore?”
“The negroes.” She pronounced the word “nigras”. “Sitting down at lunch-counters. You read about that?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, I guess I wouldn’t be my great-grandmother’s great-granddaughter if I wasn’t a little bit on the side of the negroes, even if I do live in Virginia. So why don’t you send the money along to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People?”
“If you’re sure that’s what you’d like,” said Harold, thinking of black faces looking up from the red earth as he drove along side-roads.
“That’s what I’d like,” she said. “And you can tell them that it comes from a Southern lady.”
Later that day Harold heard her being very sharp with her negro butler, accusing him, and by implication his race, of idleness and slovenliness. Harold supposed that the outburst was to keep the conscience sharp on both sides. Rich ladies, after all, should be careful with their money. He drove away next day wondering how anyone dared to generalize about Americans.
Mr Dangerfield was extremely pleased to hear about the acquisition of the alleged Reynolds, and even more pleased when he heard about Harold’s success with Mr Grant Halliday.
Grant Halliday was a lawyer who lived near Princeton, in New Jersey, in the most luxurious house Harold had ever seen. The house itself had once been a farm-house, and still looked like one: but inside it was as though a panel of interior decorators had been competing to see how much they could spend. What Harold mistook for reproductions of Matisse and Picasso were in fact genuine, but his gaffe was quickly swallowed in the effortlessly deep purple carpet which lay everywhere, even in the cupboards.
Halliday welcomed him with an enormous Martini, and said, “I’m ashamed to tell you, Mr Barlow, but I don’t have the picture here right now. It didn’t fit, kind of. In fact it’s been in the bank ever since my father died. He used to tell people it was his English great-great-grandfather, but that was a lie. I’m telling you, it was one big lie.”
“Well, there’s no harm in that,” said Harold.
“What!” said Halliday. “But we’re Ukrainian Jews, Mr Barlow. The real name’s Varitsky, or some such. My grandfather called himself after the first man he met over here some guy in the Customs shed, I guess. And he kept it secret what his real name was. I never did discover.”
“Well, I wouldn’t let it worry me,” said Harold.
“It doesn’t. But I didn’t like to have the picture in the house. It seemed kind of phoney, you know what I mean? And anyway, look at this house. What does it want with a portrait, for Christ’s sake?”
“Well, if you’re willing to part with it, Mr Halliday——”
“Call me Grant. Yes, I’m willing.”
They had another drink and discussed the price. Halliday nodded when Harold told him what Dangerfield hoped to buy it for.
“That sounds fair enough. I had an art dealer look at it when you first wrote me. He said it was worth round about that. O.K. It’s a deal.”
They drove to the bank and looked at the picture. It was an indifferent early eighteenth-century portrait of a young man, unquestionably Aubrey Dangerfield, the one who had altered Dangerfield House.
Halliday made Harold move from his hotel in Princeton to the luxurious house, to spend the weekend, at the end of which Harold had drunk a great deal and learned something of Jewish cooking. Halliday and his wife, a pretty woman of Harold’s age with black hair and a discontented mouth that suddenly flicked its corners into laughter, kept up a continual and exhausting quarrel which both obviously enjoyed enormously—all the more so for Harold’s presence.
As he went back to New York it occurred to Harold that he hadn’t looked out of a window in all the time he had stayed at the house.
“We are the ex-urbanites,” Halliday had said. “At least, I guess that’s what they call us now. We used to be just the millionaire commuters around here, but now we’re exurbanites like everyone else.”
No doubt, Harold thought as he joined the Turnpike, they commuted to New York for a little relaxation after their strenuous weekends. There had been a party for every meal, and no one went to bed before three.
With the other east coast portrait Harold had less success. It was owned by a Miss Woodbury, of Montpelier, Vermont. She lived some way from the city, in a narrow crack in the hills. Her house was small and friendly-looking, but rather sad, for Miss Woodbury had devoted it to the memory of her father.
“I have not moved a stick of furniture since he died,” she told Harold. “Nor shall I ever do so.”
Miss Woodbury’s father had been a local judge.
“I have been called obstinate in my time. But to me the obedience of children to their parents does not stop when the parents pass on. My father loved this house, he loved every picture, every carpet, every stone in the fireplace. To despoil the work of a man’s lifetime would be a heinous assault on morality, would it not, Mr Barlow?”
Taken aback, Harold said, “Well——”
“So good-bye, Mr Barlow. It has been a pleasure to meet you. I am only sorry that I cannot possibly help you.”
Harold managed to stay a little longer, however, and to establish that Miss Woodbury was an only child. Delicately he approached the subject of the house’s contents after Miss Woodbury’s death.
“I suppose,” he said, “that you will open the house to the public, Miss Woodbury?”
“Why, no,” she said, looking most put out. “What makes you think I would do a thing like that?”
“I’m sorry. I thought you meant the house to be a sort of
museum.”
“That is true, Mr Barlow.” She fidgeted with the lid of an old tobacco-jar. “But I don’t expect my father’s memory will live much beyond me. This is more of a personal museum, than a public one.”
“Then I’m sure you will understand Mr Dangerfield’s anxiety to ensure the return of his family pictures to his family house, Miss Woodbury.”
Miss Woodbury understood perfectly. She was tall and thin and fifty-five, with iron-grey hair and pale but shining blue eyes. She could not possibly part with the picture during her lifetime, she said. But she promised to leave instructions in her will that at her death Mr Dangerfield was to be given the opportunity of buying his ancestor’s portrait.
Privately, Harold considered it an offensively nasty picture. It was of Mr Dangerfield’s great-grandfather’s second wife, apparently swooning over some lilies. She didn’t look in the least attractive, and she had been painted more carelessly than Harold, who had begun to develop an eye for such things in spite of Mr Dangerfield’s certain disapproval, had thought possible for a man so famous in his day. However, he said nothing of this to Miss Woodbury, thanked her profusely, got her to put her promise in writing in a letter to Dangerfield, and went back to New York.
He also refrained from passing judgment on the portrait in his letter to Dangerfield, who was becoming increasingly excited. He had had Mrs Moore’s Reynolds flown to London, and it was being cleaned. He was lyrical about its beauty and the charm of the sitter. Expert after expert was being summoned to give his opinion of its authenticity.
“I have always wanted to have a Reynolds,” he wrote, “and now I have the chance to discover one, as it were, I have every intention o
f making the fact known.”
There was a good deal more in the letter, of which the most important part was an order for Harold to take a long trip to Texas and California and Colorado. But the emphasis was on California.
“You know how much I wish to recover the miniature,” wrote Dangerfield. “And in spite of your doubts, in spite of the unanswered letters, I wish you to go in person to investigate Mr Washburn or what remains of him. I have been looking at a map of the United States. It seems to me that you could well make a round trip—going to California via Texas, and coming back via Denver. Or vice versa, as you wish. In any case, I do not wish to hear from you again until you are west of the Mississippi. Keep a careful record of all that you see. It has long been my ambition to visit the Grand Canyon. Please write to me at length about its size, the impression it makes on your mind, its colouring and history. Do not fail to go down it, as I believe is possible. Surely there are mules in America? You should also see the Deep South, but you are not to get involved in any politics. I do not wish to be responsible for your death by lynching.”
The last sentence was, Harold decided, an acknowledgment from Dangerfield that it was all right to be left of centre: it implied that the middle-aged were prepared to sympathize with the young without actually understanding or sharing their beliefs. At any rate, Dangerfield seemed to have realized that Harold wasn’t exactly a Tory, and didn’t mind. This was something of a relief, for at times Harold had felt he was cheating Dangerfield, using him and his money and his family portraits as an excuse to get out of the tedium of Craxton Street.
He wrote to Mrs Bannister of Denver, saying that he hoped to be there some time in May. It would be nicer to go South for the spring. And anyway, Mr Connor, of Austin, Texas, sounded an extremely tough nut to crack, while Mrs Bannister sounded quite easy.
As Far as You Can Go Page 13