The Forsyte saga - Complete

one hand Bodkin proffered the pictures to the foreign market, with the other he formed a list of private British collectors. Having obtained what he considered the highest possible bids from across the seas, he submitted pictures and bids to the private British collectors, and invited them, of their public spirit, to outbid. In three instances (including the Goya) out of twenty-one he was successful. And why? One of the private collectors made buttons—he had made so many that he desired that his wife should be called Lady “Buttons.” He therefore bought a unique picture at great cost, and gave it to the nation. It was “part,” his friends said, “of his general game.” The second of the private collectors was an Americophobe, and bought an unique picture to “spite the damned Yanks.” The third of the private collectors was Soames, who—more sober than either of the, others—bought after a visit to Madrid, because he was certain that Goya was still on the up grade. Goya was not booming at the moment, but he would come again; and, looking at that portrait, Hogarthian, Manetesque in its directness, but with its own queer sharp beauty of paint, he was perfectly satisfied still that he had made no error, heavy though the price had been—heaviest he had ever paid. And next to it was hanging the copy of “La Vendimia.” There she was—the little wretch—looking back at him in her dreamy mood, the mood he loved best because he felt so much safer when she looked like that. He was still gazing when the scent of a cigar impinged on his nostrils, and a voice said: “Well, Mr. Forsyde, what you goin' to do with this small lot?” That Belgian chap, whose mother—as if Flemish blood were not enough—had been Armenian! Subduing a natural irritation, he said: “Are you a judge of pictures?” “Well, I've got a few myself.” “Any Post-Impressionists?” “Ye-es, I rather like them.” “What do you think of this?” said Soames, pointing to the Gauguin. Monsieur Profond protruded his lower lip and short pointed beard. “Rather fine, I think,” he said; “do you want to sell it?” Soames checked his instinctive “Not particularly”—he would not chaffer with this alien. “Yes,” he said. “What do you want for it?” “What I gave.” “All right,” said Monsieur Profond. “I'll be glad to take that small picture. Post-Impressionists—they're awful dead, but they're amusin'. I don' care for pictures much, but I've got some, just a small lot.” “What do you care for?” Monsieur Profond shrugged his shoulders. “Life's awful like a lot of monkeys scramblin' for empty nuts.” “You're young,” said Soames. If the fellow must make a generalization, he needn't suggest that the forms of property lacked solidity! “I don' worry,” replied Monsieur Profond smiling; “we're born, and we die. Half the world's starvin'. I feed a small lot of babies out in my mother's country; but what's the use? Might as well throw my money in the river.” Soames looked at him, and turned back toward his Goya. He didn't know what the fellow wanted. “What shall I make my cheque for?” pursued Monsieur Profond. “Five hundred,” said Soames shortly; “but I don't want you to take it if you don't care for it more than that.” “That's all right,” said Monsieur Profond; “I'll be 'appy to 'ave that picture.” He wrote a cheque with a fountain-pen heavily chased with gold. Soames watched the process uneasily. How on earth had the fellow known that he wanted to sell that picture? Monsieur Profond held out the cheque. “The English are awful funny about pictures,” he said. “So are the French, so are my people. They're all awful funny.” “I don't understand you,” said Soames stiffly. “It's like hats,” said Monsieur Profond enigmatically, “small or large, turnin' up or down—just the fashion. Awful funny.” And, smiling, he drifted out of the gallery again, blue and solid like the smoke of his excellent cigar. Soames had taken the cheque, feeling as if the intrinsic value of ownership had been called in question. 'He's a cosmopolitan,' he thought, watching Profond emerge from under the verandah with Annette, and saunter down the lawn toward the river. What his wife saw in the fellow he didn't know, unless it was that he could speak her language; and there passed in Soames what Monsieur Profond would have called a “small doubt” whether Annette was not too handsome to be walking with any one so “cosmopolitan.” Even at that distance he could see the blue fumes from Profond's cigar wreath out in the quiet sunlight; and his grey buckskin shoes, and his grey hat—the fellow was a dandy! And he could see the quick turn of his wife's head, so very straight on her desirable neck and shoulders. That turn of her neck always seemed to him a little too showy, and in the “Queen of all I survey” manner—not quite distinguished. He watched them walk along the path at the bottom of the garden. A young man in flannels joined them down there—a Sunday caller no doubt, from up the river. He went back to his Goya. He was still staring at that replica of Fleur, and worrying over Winifred's news, when his wife's voice said: “Mr. Michael Mont, Soames. You invited him to see your pictures.” There was the cheerful young man of the Gallery off Cork Street! “Turned up, you see, sir; I live only four miles from Pangbourne. Jolly day, isn't it?” Confronted with the results of his expansiveness, Soames scrutinized his visitor. The young man's mouth was excessively large and curly—he seemed always grinning. Why didn't he grow the rest of those idiotic little moustaches, which made him look like a music-hall buffoon? What on earth were young men about, deliberately lowering their class with these tooth-brushes, or little slug whiskers? Ugh! Affected young idiots! In other respects he was presentable, and his flannels very clean. “Happy to see you!” he said. The young man, who had been turning his head from side to side, became transfixed. “I say!” he said, “'some' picture!” Soames saw, with mixed sensations, that he had addressed the remark to the Goya copy. “Yes,” he said dryly, “that's not a Goya. It's a copy. I had it painted because it reminded me of my daughter.” “By Jove! I thought I knew the face, sir. Is she here?” The frankness of his interest almost disarmed Soames. “She'll be in after tea,” he said. “Shall we go round the pictures?” And Soames began that round which never tired him. He had not anticipated much intelligence from one who had mistaken a copy for an original, but as they passed from section to section, period to period, he was startled by the young man's frank and relevant remarks. Natively shrewd himself, and even sensuous beneath his mask, Soames had not spent thirty-eight years over his one hobby without knowing something more about pictures than their market values. He was, as it were, the missing link between the artist and the commercial public. Art for art's sake and all that, of course, was cant. But aesthetics and good taste were necessary. The appreciation of enough persons of good taste was what gave a work of art its permanent market value, or in other words made it “a work of art.” There was no real cleavage. And he was sufficiently accustomed to sheep-like and unseeing visitors, to be intrigued by one who did not hesitate to say of Mauve: “Good old haystacks!” or of James Maris: “Didn't he just paint and paper 'em! Mathew was the real swell, sir; you could dig into his surfaces!” It was after the young man had whistled before a Whistler, with the words, “D'you think he ever really saw a naked woman, sir?” that Soames remarked: “What are you, Mr. Mont, if I may ask?” “I, sir? I was going to be a painter, but the War knocked that. Then in the trenches, you know, I used to dream of the Stock Exchange, snug and warm and just noisy enough. But the Peace knocked that, shares seem off, don't they? I've only been demobbed about a year. What do you recommend, sir?” “Have you got money?” “Well,” answered the young man, “I've got a father; I kept him alive during the War, so he's bound to keep me alive now. Though, of course, there's the question whether he ought to be allowed to hang on to his property. What do you think about that, sir?” Soames, pale and defensive, smiled. “The old man has fits when I tell him he may have to work yet. He's got land, you know; it's a fatal disease.” “This is my real Goya,” said Soames dryly. “By George! He was a swell. I saw a Goya in Munich once that bowled me middle stump. A most evil-looking old woman in the most gorgeous lace. He made no compromise with the public taste. That old boy was 'some' explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of convention in his day. Couldn't he just paint! He makes Velasquez stiff, don't you think?” “I have no Velasquez,” said Soames. The young man stared. “No,” he said; “only nations or profiteers can afford him, I suppose. I say, why shouldn't all the bankrupt nations sell their Velasquez and Titians and other swells to the profiteers by force, and then pass a law that any one who holds a picture by an Old Master—see schedule—must hang it in a public gallery? There seems something in that.” “Shall we go down to tea?” said Soames. The young man's ears seemed to droop on his skull. 'He's not dense,' thought Soames, following him off the premises. Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original “line,” and the daring of his light and shade, could have reproduced to admiration the group assembled round Annette's tea-tray in the inglenook below. He alone, perhaps, of painters would have done justice to the sunlight filtering through a screen of creeper, to the lovely pallor of brass, the old cut glasses, the thin slices of lemon in pale amber tea; justice to Annette in her black lacey dress; there was something of the fair Spaniard in her beauty, though it lacked the spirituality of that rare type; to Winifred's grey-haired, corseted solidity; to Soames, of a certain grey and flat-cheeked distinction; to the vivacious Michael Mont, pointed in ear and eye; to Imogen, dark, luscious of glance, growing a little stout; to Prosper Profond, with his expression as who should say, “Well, Mr. Goya, what's the use of paintin' this small party?” finally, to Jack Cardigan, with his shining stare and tanned sanguinity betraying the moving principle: “I'm English, and I live to be fit.” Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared solemnly one day at Timothy's that she would never marry a good man—they were so dull—should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom health had so destroyed all traces of original sin, that she