Nothing That Meets the Eye (14 page)

The torment seized him once more and he wondered that he had felt those few seconds of freedom. “There is no solution but that the Negro child should die,” he said. “I'll see that he does. I'll fix it.”

But Emma wasn't listening. She broke a cinnamon bun in half, ate it slowly, dipping portions of it into her tea, turning her smooth, pale face slightly as she took her bites.

Strangely she grew more and more real. She was no longer something artificial, without past or future. The child was a promise of some tomorrow. She was no longer like one of his blank canvases, on which he would paint what he would. She was real. One day she would remember, and speak the truth.

She rose up. “I want to go into the garden. I want to go and talk.” She went into the kitchen and turned, waiting for him.

The lamplight put a ring about her head. She was like an angel, transparent, without understanding of deception.

“There is no solution but that he must die!” he repeated.

Emma waited. “I don't understand you. I don't understand what troubles you.”

“It wasn't I!” he cried, as if he must fight her accusation. “No one can think it was I when they know how I take care of her. Everyone knows I take care of her like a child! That I treat her better than any other man would. . . . Everyone knows what she means to me . . . alone in that house!” He came close to her, pleading to the hollow oracle. “They know how I feed her and talk to her just as though she could hear me, when any other man would have put her into an institution! Didn't they all say I should put her away or I'd go crazy? Don't they all say what a rare good man I am to keep her? Don't they, Emma?”

“Of course, that's so.”

He laughed bitter, falsetto. “I guess Jim Crawford . . . I guess they'll all be surprised to know how we read Blake and Shelley and drink tea and look at paintings and talk about things no one else can understand! . . . I guess they'd be surprised to know that's all we do, wouldn't they, Emma, my darling?”

“Oh, yes . . . yes.”

“Isn't it so they call me ‘professor'?”

“That's so,” Emma replied. And, bored with his tumultuous moods, she turned and continued on her way to the back door.

He followed her, heard the faint rustle of her long dress, the click of the door latch. When Emma went out, he stood on the threshold, listening to hear if anyone was waiting outside.

He stepped down after a moment, hurried after her, and whispered fearfully, “I must go, Emma. I'll be going now!” He was feeble and insignificant in the expanse of the night. But a voice inside him countered, Where? Where?

They passed through the grape arbor, whose white trellises showed occasionally through the leaves. Emma was somewhere near him, amorphous, escaping him. He longed for the security of the hammer in his hand. He turned quickly to go back for it, and then he was afraid to enter the house alone.

“It was here I heard the voice,” Emma said, leaning back against the post that supported the well roof. “It said, so quietly I could hardly hear, that from this small village my child should cast a beam so fine and strong it would encircle the earth.”

He remembered when he had said “from that small village . . .” and what had he said would encircle the earth?

“Wherever men's hearts are closed against one another, they should be opened to see all the workings of the earth and of themselves as a reflection of God's glory . . . all the music, poetry, painting, all creations would be delights doing honor to God. All powers of mind and spirit derived from God.”

“Blake!” he whispered. “Blake you were remembering. We read that months ago!”

Emma was silent. He heard her make a little bewildered sound in her throat, could feel all her being reaching trustingly toward him, helplessly toward him, thought he could see only the milky glow of her face in the dark.

He was repulsed by the thought that, overcome as she was now by the hypnosis of her words, she might come to him, her hands groping about his face. He could not have borne it. . . .

“But it was the voice I heard,” she declared.

He had stood several seconds near motionless from the anxiety of the darkness. Now he began to regain confidence. “Since the child's conception was a miracle, it is fitting that his birth should be also,” he remarked calmly, in the preacherlike tone he knew she loved. She bent forward as though drinking from a spring. His brain worked with clarity, with a detachment that shamed him. He remembered one evening when he had spoken of a crazy whirling picture in his brain which he was going to paint. It would be called The Creation of the World. Emma had followed him about the room, savoring the abstractness of his words, and he had retreated, babbling on and on and retreating until he was in a corner, and then he had told her to go back to her chair, and she had gone. And when he said to her, “Come here,” she had come. He had sent her back and forth many times, until the game had frightened him and made him ashamed.

He reached his hand out to her. “Come,” he said, “tell me about the miracle.”

She came around the curve of the well. “Oh, he will be brought forth only with the sweet pain of a revelation, spreading happiness beyond all measure.”

“And if he were to appear in his time from the well, like a spirit emerging from the center of God's creation, then his coming would be miracle enough. He could command all the people who would wonder at his birth. . . . Isn't it so, Emma?”

“Yes!” She reached out for his hands. “That would be a miracle!”

“Yes.” He did not realize how icy his hands were until he felt her warmth. “Destroy yourself, for your presence will make only confusion.” He drew her nearer to the well rim, nearer to himself. “Otherwise the people's minds will be divided, for you are mortal. . . . Is it not a fitting thing the child should come forth of his own?”

There was a sharp crack from the road, as of a tree breaking.

He recoiled to the other side of the well. “What was that?” he whispered.

Emma had not taken her eyes from him. She leaned toward him, held to the well stones, and took a step toward him.

“Emma, don't look at me! What was that on the road?”

She turned her head in the direction he pointed, but she was not seeing, not listening for anything but the magic words.

The gate swung in the soil. Steps came slowly, grinding on the ground.

Arthur could hardly breathe. The miracle, the scales, the fantastic theater he had played in, were dispelled. He could not find himself. He was in limbo, and in his mind now was the paralyzing quiet. His brain was seized in the prison of his own evilness. . . . Polluter! destroyer! And no goodness ever! He drew his fingertips along the stones till he felt them bleed. The steps came closer—cautious, flaring eyes somewhere in the darkness.

Emma heard the crack of his head in the column of the well, the impact of his body meeting the water. The air in the well shimmered like the water and settled into silence.

Dumbly Emma stood without stirring, dumb to the Negro's voice which said something to her as from an enormous distance. The thread that had guided her through the labyrinth of her world had been severed. She relaxed suddenly, broke into a wild scream that died like the wail of an animal lost in the woods.

She stumbled toward the house. “Oh, God!” she cried. “Look down on us! Oh, God, save us!”

THE GREAT CARDHOUSE

L
ucien Montlehuc started a little when he saw the notice. He read it twice, slowly, and then, as if he finally believed it, put down his newspaper and removed his monocle. A habitual expression of amusement returned to his face, and his lids fluttered over his bright blue eyes. “Imagine Gaston Potin taken in by it!” he said to himself. “Of all people to be fooled!”

This thought made him even more gleeful. It would not be the first time that he had proven Gaston Potin wrong. This particular Giotto was a forgery, and Gaston was putting it up for sale as a genuine. Lucien meant to have it, and the sale was that very afternoon. How fortunate he had been to see the notice in time! The magnificent counterfeit might have slipped through his fingers again.

Lucien put his monocle back in the grip of his slightly protruding brow, summoned François and ordered him to pack their bags for an overnight stay in Aix-en-Provence. While he waited, he turned to The Revelation to the Shepherds in his book of Giotto reproductions and studied it. Again he thought how odd it was that poor Gaston Potin would not have suspected it to be a forgery. Perhaps it was the too-rigid faces of the kneeling shepherds that told him the painting was not from Giotto's hand. There was no real religious feeling there. The annunciatory angel's robe was a too-brilliant pink. The composition itself was not right, not Giotto—but it was magnificent, as a forgery. Lucien did not need a magnifying glass to detect a forgery. Something within him, some inner sensory apparatus, betrayed the spurious instantly and always. It never failed.

Besides, hadn't an Englishman, Sir Ronald Dunsenny, questioned the authenticity of this Revelation around the time of the Fruehlingen purchase? Indeed, Sir Ronald had ventured that the original had been destroyed in a fire in the middle of the eighteenth century! Evidently Gaston Potin didn't know that.

It was Lucien's passion to collect the most perfect imitations, and only the imitations, of the great artists. He did not want genuine paintings. And he prided himself that his sham masterpieces were such fine shams that any could, if presented as the original, fool the eyes of the most astute dealers and critics in the world.

Lucien had played many such tricks during the fifteen years he had been collecting forgeries. He might submit one of his forgeries as a loan from an individual who owned the original, for instance, then attend the exhibition and remark his suspicions publicly, to be proven right in the end, of course. Twice he had subjected Gaston Potin—with his great reputation as an art dealer—to such embarrassment. And once, Lucien had made Gaston uneasy about an original by presenting one of his forgeries that was so good it had taken six experts three days to decide which picture was the original. All in all, it had caused Gaston Potin to refer scathingly to Lucien's well-known collection and to his lamentable taste for the bogus. Lamentable to whom? Lucien wondered. And why? His pranks had cost him a few friendships, perhaps, but then he cared as little for friendship as he cared for the true Leonardos, the true Renis, the true anything: friendship and bona fide masterpieces were too natural, too easy, too boring. Not that he actually disliked people, and people liked Lucien well enough, but if friendship threatened, Lucien withdrew.

His six-million-franc Delahaye sped along the Route Napoleon from Paris toward Aix at a hundred kilometers an hour. Plane trees in full leaf, their smooth bark peeling in purplish, pink, and beige patches, flickered by at the edges of the road like picket fences. A landscape of dusky orange and green and tan, the occasional blue of a farmer's cart—a landscape as beautifully composed as a Gobelin tapestry—unfolded continuously on right and left, but Lucien had no eye for it. Nature's creations did not interest him compared to man's, and his stocky body sat deep in the seat of the car. Today there was the Fruehlingen Giotto to think about, and he looked forward to the auction with the keen, single-minded anticipation of a hunter or a lover. Merely for Lucien Montlehuc to bid for a painting meant that the painting was, or most likely was, a counterfeit, and would in this case immediately throw suspicion upon Gaston, who was sponsoring the auction. Some of the audience at Aix might think he was trying to play another trick on Gaston, of course, by bidding. So much the better when the experts confirmed the falsity after the picture was his.

“Excellent snails,” Lucien remarked with satisfaction, his pink cheeks glowing after his luncheon. He and François walked quickly to the car.

“Excellent, monsieur,” François replied agreeably. His good humor reflected that of his master. François was tall and lean and congenitally lazy, though he never failed to carry out an order from Lucien. He had not forgotten that he had once been earmarked for execution by the Spanish government for being in possession of a false passport. Because François had been amused and cool about the whole thing, he had won Lucien's admiration, and Lucien had managed to buy his freedom. Since then François, actually a Russian who had escaped to Czechoslovakia with a price on his head, had lived in France, safe and content to be alive and in Lucien's employ.

Lucien himself had once lived in Czechoslovakia. In 1926, most European papers had carried an account of a very young Captain Lucas Minchovik, a soldier of fortune who had been severely wounded in a skirmish on the Yugoslav border. Years ago, in Czechoslovakia, people had sometimes asked him about the 1926 report, the young captain's heroism having made the story memorable, but Lucien had always disclaimed any knowledge of it. It had been another soldier of the same name, he said. Finally, he had changed his name and come to France.

In Aix, Lucien and François stopped first at the Hôtel des Étrangers to reserve a three-room suite, then drove on to the Musée de Tapisserie beside the Cathedral Saint-Sauveur. The auction was to be held in the open court of the musée, and was scheduled to begin in half an hour, but things in Aix were always late. Cars of all sizes and manufacture cluttered the narrow streets around the cathedral, and the courtyard was a bedlam of hurrying workmen and chattering agents and dealers and private buyers who had not yet begun to seat themselves.

“Do you see M. Potin?” Lucien asked François, who was a good deal taller than Lucien.

“No, monsieur.”

An acquaintance of Lucien's, a dealer from Strasbourg, told him that M. Potin was giving a luncheon at his villa just outside the town, and that he had not yet arrived.

Lucien decided to pay Gaston Potin a visit. He was eager to let Gaston know of his interest in the Giotto. As they drew up to Gaston's Villa Madeleine, Lucien heard the treble notes of a piano from within. Faint but bell-like, it was a Scarlatti sonata. He was shown into the hall by a servant. Through the open door of the salon, Lucien saw a slender woman seated at the piano, and a score of men and a few women standing or sitting motionless, listening to her. Lucien paused at the threshold, adjusted his monocle, and espied Gaston just behind the piano, concentrating on the music with an expression of rapt and sentimental enjoyment. Lucien's eyes swept the rest of the company. They were all here—Font-Martigue of the Dauberville Gallery in Paris, Fritz Heber of Vienna, Martin Palmer of London. Certainly the cream.

And they were all listening to the sonata—with the same absorption as Gaston. Lucien's appearance in the doorway had not even been noticed. The fast movement the woman was playing was splendid indeed. The notes sparkled from her fingers like drops of pure springwater. But to Lucien's ear, which was as infallible as his eye, an ingredient was missing—a pleasure in the performance. It was audible to Lucien that she detested Scarlatti, if not music itself. Lucien smiled. Could she really be holding the company as spellbound as it looked? But of course she was. How obtuse people were, even those who professed a knowledge of the arts! There was a perfect crash of applause from the little audience when she finished.

Lucien saw Gaston coming toward him with the pianist on his arm. Gaston smiled at Lucien as if the music had made him forget that there had ever been unpleasantnesses between them.

“Very happy and surprised to see you, Lucien!” Gaston said. “May I present the music teacher of my childhood—Mlle. Claire Duhamel of Aix.”

“Enchanté, mademoiselle,” said Lucien. He observed with satisfaction the stir of interest his entry into the salon had caused.

“She plays superbly, doesn't she?” Gaston went on. “She has just been asked to give a series of concerts in Paris, but she has refused, n'est-ce pas, Mlle. Claire? Aix should not be deprived of your music for so long!”

Lucien smiled politely, then said, “I learned of your sale only this morning, Gaston. Why didn't you send me an announcement?”

“Because I was sure there is nothing here that would interest you. These are all authentic pictures of my own choosing.”

“But The Revelation to the Shepherds interests me enormously!” Lucien told him with a smile. “I don't suppose if it's here you might let me see it now.”

Behind Gaston's frank surprise, there was just the least alarm. “But with the greatest pleasure, Lucien. Follow me.”

Mlle. Duhamel, who had been gazing at Lucien all the while, checked him with the question, “Are you an admirer of Giotto, too, M. Montlehuc?”

Lucien looked at her. She was a typical vieille femme—an old maid—of a Provençal town, drab and shy, yet with an air of tenacious purpose in her own narrow, cramped way of life, a look of wiry vigor that suggested a plant growing at the edge of a wind-whipped cliff. Gentle, sad gray eyes looked out of her small face with such depression of spirit that one wanted to turn away immediately, because of an inability to help her. A less attractive person Lucien could not have imagined. “Yes, mademoiselle,” he said, and hurried after Gaston.

Lucien's first sight of the picture brought that leap of excitement and recognition that only the finest forgeries gave him. From the patina, he judged the picture to be more than two hundred years old. And today it would be his.

“You see?” Gaston smiled confidently.

Lucien sighed, in mock defeat. “I see. A beautiful piece indeed. My congratulations, Gaston.”

Lucien attended the auction in the subdued manner of one who watches from the outside, a bystander. He waited with impatience while an indifferent Messina and a miserable “Ignoto Veneziano” from the Fruehlingen collection were put up and sold. Apart from the false Giotto, Lucien thought mischievously, the Barons von Fruehlingen did have execrable taste!

Mlle. Duhamel, on a bench against the side wall, was again staring at him, he noticed, with what thoughts behind her quiet gray eyes, he could not guess. Lucien found something disturbing, something arrogantly omniscient in her scrutiny. For an instant, he resented her fiercely and unreasonably. Lucien removed his monocle and passed his fingertips lightly across his lids. When he looked up again, the Revelation was on the dais.

A man whom Lucien could not see bid a million new francs.