The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘Thomasina shook her head. She had already taken care to clear the ample payment sent originally. Instead, “What can you tell me about the Most Ancient & Sublime Society, sir?” she demanded, with chilly politeness, as she steadily repacked the orrery into a well-wadded box. The young man in the flimsy spectacles seemed anxious to depart.

  ‘ “Oh, it is a relic, nothing more. As you correctly assumed, it was founded in the 18th century; and it was favoured by those who preferred to work on—” he fidgeted —“shall we say, the edges of the sciences and at the places where the higher arts and sciences meet?” This description seemed to gratify him, for he smiled rather narrowly, more to himself than at us. Which arts and which sciences, I wondered at once, as I looked at him. I decided to try if a sudden allusion might discompose him.

  ‘ “There are many rumours of a Device for the Confounding of the Spheres. Soon, it is said, all things will be out of Countenance,” I quoted.

  ‘He remained impassive, merely inclining his head a little. “Ah, yes. Henry Wharton’s diary. Very entertaining. Not considered reliable as history, mark you. Indeed, a most unreliable source, I believe.” Then, with a sweeping gesture, he gathered up the few remaining components, wrapped them hastily together, nodded briefly, added them to the box which Thomasina had been packing, thanked her again for her trouble and strode out as briskly as his burden would allow.’

  The Connoisseur sighed and shrugged. ‘There is very little more to tell,’ he concluded. ‘My surmise would be that the Most Ancient & Sublime Society, or elements of it at least, were interested in what their contemporary Pope called the “seed of Chaos and of Night” that would restore the Saturnian Age, though the meaning of that seed and that Age for them is not clear to us now. The anti-orrery that they had made was perhaps a symbol that they had not stopped content with the scepticism and the rationality of their age, but wished to travel beyond both religious faith and scientific humanism into darker grounds altogether, into indeed the very Universal Darkness that Pope proclaimed was the ultimate tendency of his time. It was perhaps, also, a device for bringing the users of it into a state of the soul akin to the Saturnine vision, by some form of entrancement such as we had experienced.

  ‘There are so many today, I suspect, who believe that the emergence of Saturn was a miscegenation, and who would wish to nurture darker growths still from the seed of Chaos and of Night: so it is no wonder the young Trustee was in so much dread to get the instrument away. And this?—’ he tumbled the minute silver sphere around the palm of his hand—‘This is the Moon of that strange mechanism, which somehow the young man overlooked, lying as it did between my fingers. He has never returned for it. I do not think it will make any difference to the workings—it is so insignificant.’

  ‘And yet,’ he mused, ‘even one less in the thrall of the old dark Titan, even one silver glimmer …’

  Café Lucifer

  One afternoon when I visited The Connoisseur in his rooms, after a short absence, I found him sipping jasmine tea from a square-columned cup with a broad circular rim and an arrow-shaped handle. He told me had just returned from advising on, and helping to administer, a trust for the rescue and reopening of a rare architectural work in a Worcestershire spa town. Setting down the cup in its heptagonal saucer, he began to tell me something more about his visit, which had involved another of his encounters with the curious and recondite.

  ‘It is situated at the cusp of an ancient narrow lane, not far from the hub of the place, but still sufficiently obscure to remain mostly unvisited and unknown. Lucifer Hall is the most authentic domestic-scale Cubist building in Britain. It was built for Charles Barwick-Fowkes, a radical young engineer and heir to a small company who made industrial models, fully working maquettes of vehicles, machines, instruments not yet at the prototype stage. He had a fascination for the possibilities of the new urban construction materials—glass, concrete, treated metals—and also for the avant-garde and their discovery of the potential in pure light, symmetry, colour, form. He commissioned the building from a young Czech émigré architect, Emil Zaska, who stayed in the area for several years: and Lucifer House is certainly one of his most remarkable achievements.

  ‘Occupying a corner site in the shape of a drawn bow, it is an absolute model of pure lines and geometric invention, uniting all the streamlined sleekness we associate with art deco with the deeper complexities of the most profound abstract art. Its front façade and wings are tactfully faceted in pale stone, and slender upward-sloping pillars divide vast angled glass. There are pleasing symmetrical details such as the finely bevelled capitals above each column, and the pyramid finials. Barwick-Fowkes built it as a gathering-place and sort-of “mission headquarters” for his vision of a modern transformation: it was to be lecture hall, gallery, meeting place, bookshop, and in some sense temple I rather think. His ardour attracted to him quite a circle of like minds, from artists at the furthest edge of the new, to renegade anthroposophists, concrete poets, quixotic inventors, free form dancers, and many who were simply seized by the sheer energy of it all. The name, Lucifer Hall, was partly I suspect a deliberate provocation, but officially derived from the original sense—“light-bearer”.

  ‘Sadly, when Barwick-Fowkes was killed in an aeroplane accident a few years later, the light went out of the project and though it struggled on for a few more years, it was eventually given up in its original form and the hall sold off. Under the safer name of Barwick House it became offices. With the insertion of crude partitions, the blinding of several windows, the addition of false ceilings, the imposition of bland colour schemes and crass fascia, the building was a sorry travesty of its original boldness. Now at last it has been returned to its original plan. We have been able to restore much of the original interior on all four floors, and we have reopened the Hall with an exhibition of work—sculptures, artefacts, installations—inspired by the Cubist vision.

  ‘But there are some things we cannot reconstruct. On the first floor, for example, the unique Cubist café has disappeared, with all of its bright appurtenances, almost as if it had been systematically dismantled and dispersed. No appeals either locally or internationally yielded any of the original work there, except the odd piece such as this cup and saucer, which I am taking care of, temporarily as I hope, until the café can be reconstructed. From photographs, the interior of the café looks to have been very striking. But the trapezoidal tables, the cuneiform chrome fittings, the ironwork hanging lanterns with their half-star motifs, and what I at first thought was a lamp standard, with a column of rhomboid planes and a round glass mantle atop: all these are gone.

  ‘It was while I was alone in the space where the café had been, that U-shaped room with its white vaulting reaching up to a high focal point, with the brilliant light from the windows which crane towards the outer air; it was here that I felt steal over me a strange exultation. Of course, this could seem merely great contentment at the completion of the project, and aesthetic pleasure at such a finely conceived design. But this seemed so much more than that. As I stood in that triumph of proportion I felt possessed by a—well, a shiver of soaringness, a literal enlightening of my thought, senses, consciousness. I felt extraordinarily in harmony with things, with what I can only describe as a kind of crystalline blitheness. As I gazed around me, I began to sense too something more, some hint of an active force in the elevations of the room and in the directions of the light and in the nodal points where symmetrical shapes met.

  ‘I paced softly around the room, as one in a white cloister, and paused before each of the few exhibits we had placed here. I found myself drawn towards an object on a black plinth. It was a plain glass sphere, not clear but somewhat greeny and grainy in tint, much as if one of those lichened stone globes that sit on gate piers had been reduced almost to transparency but had retained some vestige of its original petrifaction. And inside this sphere was embedded a long prism, much brighter and sharper, which refracted light in strange rays as one gaz
ed at it, from whatever aspect: so that, with the effect also of shadows, flaws and curving reflections in the sphere, there was an impression of facing a very singular instrument, enacting rapid mysterious formulae within its depths, well beyond our understanding. It commanded an intent fascination from me for many minutes.

  ‘When I was at length conscious of my surroundings, my first thought was to seek out the origin of this green globe and see what had inspired the idea of it, and whether there was some art in it other than that we normally know. I rather raced down the keyhole staircase, with its fine chrome handrails, to find out more from the papers in the office. As I pattered down, I passed on the stair a slim dark figure ascending, and smiling my apologies for my sudden onrush, I paid him, or her, little heed. I supposed they were also involved in the final preparations for the opening. And so they might very well have been: and yet—’

  The Connoisseur broke off, got up, and paced about a bit. ‘It’s always so confounded difficult to avoid seeing significance in things retrospectively, you see.’ He shrugged and resumed his place.

  ‘Well, the information we had on the green globe that had so drawn me to it was very sparse. The caption to accompany the piece was simply: “Lumina Studio, Prague. Replica of an original Cubist artefact. On loan. Private commission.” There was nothing more I could glean that day, despite sifting through some other papers to see what else we knew. But on the next day I asked the curator of the exhibition what he could tell me about the origin of the piece. It seemed that he knew a little about the studio, which had been at the forefront of fine and applied art manufacture since the beginning of the century, often making limited edition pieces for the more adventurous collector. They had sent him a photograph of the piece, offering it for the exhibition on behalf of the client who had commissioned it from them, who was not named. They had also confirmed that they had produced a similar work in the original Cubist heyday. On the strength of their reputation and impeccably authentic lineage, and of the obvious Cubist influence on the work, he had accepted it. Naturally, I tried to contact the studio to find out more: but as well as language difficulties, I also sensed a courteous evasiveness in response to my tentative questions, and the only information I obtained was that the client was an Englishman.

  ‘I put the matter aside for the time being and in the press of business associated with the opening of the exhibition I did not dwell much further on the strangely heightened mood I had experienced in the old room of the Café Lucifer. It was only after some days that my thoughts strayed back to that episode and, on a particularly quiet afternoon, when I thought I might be alone in the lower floors of the hall, I was tempted to return and see whether I might again attain that state of mind, or soul. But in fact I found that I was not alone, that there was one visitor, a tall elderly man with well-groomed white hair and an alert frown. He was staring from one of the fine vista windows, and his profile was sharpened and illuminated by the bright light the window drew inwards to the room. I thought that I had seen him viewing the exhibition on several other occasions: I had noticed him in particular because most other visitors were much younger. I had no wish to disturb him, so I made as if to go further into the room on some pretence. But before I could do so, he turned and addressed me: “You have been asking after me, I believe?” he said.

  ‘At first I was nonplussed. But he gestured towards the plinth displaying the globe and prism, and I understood at once with a lunge of excited interest that the Lumina Studio had been in contact with their anonymous English client. We shook hands and made our introductions. My visitor gave his name as Edward Cleobury and asked me why I was particularly interested in this exhibit. I started my explanation conventionally enough, with remarks on the artistic value of the piece and on its origin in the renowned Prague studio, but under Cleobury’s keen gaze I soon petered out … I finished fairly lamely with a hint of my experience in the room of the old Cubist café where we now stood, saying only that such was my fascination with the piece that I had lost track of time and had almost seemed in another dimension. I said this as if it were simply a turn of phrase, though in truth that was precisely what I had felt.

  ‘At this the old man drew in his breath sharply and seemed to deliberate carefully over his next remarks. I ushered him into one of the angular-backed benches, replicas positioned for visitors to take in the total effect of the soaring space of the room, and he began to tell me his story. After he had left, I dashed down notes of what he had said and especially a few particularly striking phrases, so that they remain vivid for me still.

  ‘Cleobury explained that as a young man he had been part of the Lucifer Hall crowd. He had not known Barwick-Fowkes particularly well, but he had become involved with this strange spa town community when he was experimenting in “Colour Music”, an attempt to create symphonies of coloured light either on bare walls or sweeping over the audience themselves. Cleobury invented a device to “play” this new art form and gave “concerts” in the Hall. This, however, was by the by, except that it indicated the kind of new thinking and curious happenings that were part of the programme in the Hall.

  ‘There were many other eccentric ideas—the place attracted the outré like a lodestone—but Cleobury’s conviction was that in fact the most advanced in his thinking and art was the Prague architect, Emil Zaska: and he suggested to me, with ironic allusiveness, that perhaps I had noticed the very building itself seemed to possess remarkable qualities? He said to me rather quaintly that Zaska, though only in his late twenties was “a very deep fellow” who was convinced that fine architecture was not just, as the famous phrase had it, “frozen music”, but believed that in its response to light, space and symmetry it could also be “encrypted spirit”—that was his claim exactly, Cleobury recalled.

  ‘The globe and prism, Cleobury said, was a feature of the original Café Lucifer, and had been brought over from Prague by Zaska. It rested on one of his boldest designs, a faceted pillar—I realised then that this was what I had mistaken for a lamp in the old photograph of the café—and was known facetiously by the habitués as “the touchstone”. Zaska was apparently rather slyly mysterious about it, claiming all sorts of extravagant powers for it, but always with a mockery and jocularity that defied you to treat him seriously. He said, for example, that it concentrated all the power of all the boldest thinking in the Lucifer Hall coterie and diffused it gently amongst the group, and that explained why no-one outside, who never visited the café, could ever understand their ideas. But he also said it was in some sense a device for focusing the essence of his design for the building …

  ‘Hence, Cleobury said, his decision to commission a replica of the artefact and loan it to the reopened Hall, as a token of his delight that the place had been rescued from its dreary former fate.

  ‘This seemed the end of his story and I thanked him for sharing it with me, suggesting that perhaps he might like to write an account of his days as part of the Lucifer Hall sodality. But he shook his head, saying, “There is something more, something more. I must—find out.” He tensed himself as if suppressing a sudden pang and then began to speak again, but this time murmuring softly into the air, rather than addressing me directly.

  ‘In the Café Lucifer at intervals, he said, he saw a young woman with dark cropped hair and a finely chiselled pale face, with a certain puckishness about the ears and eyebrows. She always wore dark glasses, unusually for those days, so that at first he thought she must be blind—but the composure with which she moved around the room implied otherwise. He found her to be a source of keen fascination and would covertly steal glances at her from a far table, not intrusively (he hoped), but with a polite admiration for her gracile features and form. She tended to wear plain dark clothing, such as a simple black tunic and trousers, again unconventionally for the time: and she always occupied the corner seat in one of the café’s obscurer angles, directly beneath Zaska’s tall pillar with its “touchstone”. He noticed that she always deftly avoided
much contact with the others who frequented the café, and so for a time he maintained his respectful distance. He asked the counter assistant about her, who vaguely recalled the girl, but could only surmise that she must be foreign, perhaps a friend of Zaska’s, because she spoke English very quietly and sparingly, with a strange inflection.

  ‘He continued to observe her whenever he could, even though he was at this time fully immersed in the colour music experiments. He even found that her face and slight figure glided through the images he encountered while working with the colour pulses, seeing her in his mind’s eye as if a dark silhouette emerging from the luminous and swirling colour compositions they created.

  ‘After some time of struggling with this obsession, he determined to make himself known to her. Soon after, he chanced to meet her in the dusk of an autumn evening in the emptiness of an upper room, which he used for some of the colour music work. He asked her swiftly and softly if he might see her, meaning, conventionally enough, if they could meet to get to know each other. She paused, stepped back several paces, smiled, and took away from her face the dark glasses. Cleobury said her eyes were the most brilliant viridian green he had ever seen and seemed to gleam with an inner intensity that sent shockwaves through his body. But that was not all. For as he focused on those fountains of green fire, he also saw, within the deep dark core of the pupils, a scintillant glinting as of a prism capturing and refracting light from an unknown source. He recoiled involuntarily, aghast, and the quick, sly smile with which she had greeted his words to her, fell from her lips.