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 generalisation, 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 towards 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 towards 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 wreathe 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. Soames 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 scrutinised 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 gallery?”
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?”