“Don’t worry,” said Francis. “I’ve been skinned enough in my time to know my way around.”
As soon as it could be managed he settled a modest—in the light of his wealth, a mingy—sum on Little Charlie, and informed Uncle Roderick and Aunt Prudence that the girl was to be maintained out of the interest on it until she was twenty-five, when she could take over the management of it herself. He also informed them that under his new circumstances—which he did not explain—he could no longer provide anything more than a very small annual sum for the maintenance of the estate, and he left unanswered the wailing, beseeching letters that followed. He thought it was good of him to give them anything at all.
He then settled himself to the task of devoting his very large income (for he never thought of touching his correspondingly larger capital) to the encouragement of art in Canada, and the experience was like that of a man who bites into a peach and breaks a tooth on the stone.
It was not that the Canadian painters whom he very quickly sought out were disagreeable, but they were strongly independent. More accurately, the good ones were independent and the ones who responded with glee to the appearance of a possible patron were not good. Francis could not get rid of his money because he would not divorce it from his advice, and the painters did not want advice. He tried to band some of them together to do work that consoled and exalted, and his words fell on politely deaf ears.
“You seem to want to create a new Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” said one of the best, a large man of Ukrainian antecedents named George Bogdanovich. “You can’t get away with it, y’know. Buy some pictures. Sure, we’re glad to sell pictures. But don’t try to be a big influence. Just leave us alone. We know what we’re doing.”
What they were doing was respectable enough, but it did not appeal to Francis. They were utterly in love with the Canadian landscape, and tried to come to terms with it in a variety of ways, some of which, Francis knew, were admirable, and a handful splendid.
“But no people ever appear in your pictures,” he said, again and again.
“Don’t want ‘em,” said Bogdanovich, answering for all. “The people stink. Most of ‘em, anyway. We paint the country, and maybe after a while the people will learn about the country from the pictures, and stink a little less. Got to begin with the country. That’s consolation and exaltation. We have to do it our own way.”
There could be no quarrelling with that. There were painters, of course, who followed the newest, fashionable trends. Without being pressed, they would explain that they dipped deep into their own Unconscious—a word that was new to Francis in this context—and drew up conceptions that were expressed in pictures that might be gaudy and rather messy rearrangements of what they saw, or felt; some were carefully wrought arrangements of colours, usually dingy. These messages from the Unconscious were deemed to be infinitely precious, evoking in sensitive viewers some hint of an Unconscious deeper than any they could explore unaided. But Francis was not impressed. What had Ruth said? “You can’t talk to the Mothers by getting them on the phone. They have an unlisted number.” These delvers clearly did not have the number. It was such fakers of a chthonic inner vision whom Francis grew to detest above all others.
So Francis had to content himself with buying pictures that he thought good, but did not much like. Without being quite sure how it happened he found that he was taking pictures from painters who lived in inaccessible places, and keeping them in his Toronto dwelling, where from time to time he was able to sell them and remit the money to the painter. He took no fee, but in a way he was a dealer. The world of collectors, not large in Canada, understood that he knew a good picture when he saw one, and his recommendation was a guarantee of quality. But this did not satisfy him, though in a desultory way it occupied him.
His satisfaction came from the pictures that had been in Saraceni’s collection, which he was able to sneak into Canada by not altogether blameless means, and store in his Toronto headquarters.
These headquarters were on the top floor of an apartment house he owned in a decent, though not a fashionable, part of Toronto. He had bought it, years before, on the advice of his cousin Larry, who had told him that he ought to diversify his holdings, and get some good real estate. There were three apartments on the top floor of the dull building, product of an unadventurous period of architecture, and Francis spread his possessions among all three. To begin, this top floor looked like a richly if oddly furnished large single apartment, but as time went on the rooms became more and more cluttered, and the space in which Francis lived grew smaller and smaller.
“God, what a magpie’s nest,” said Aylwin Ross, the first time he visited it. “ ‘Blind Fortune still bestows her gifts on such as cannot use them.’ Jonson, not me, but apt, I’m sure you will admit. Where in God’s name did all this stuff come from?”
“Inherited,” said Francis.
“From Saraceni. You don’t have to tell me.”
“In part. Much of it I have bought.”
“With the ghost of Saraceni looking over your shoulder,” said Ross. “Frank, how do you endure it?”
Frank endured it because he never thought of it as a permanent state. He was always meaning to go through his possessions carefully, banishing some to storage, perhaps selling some others, and arriving at last at a dwelling space over-furnished and over-decorated, perhaps, but recognizable as a human habitation. Meanwhile he lived in something like an antique dealer’s warehouse, to which he was continually adding the contents of new crates, cartons, and parcels. It was fortunate that his apartment house possessed a freight elevator, as well as the shuddering, murmurous bronze cage in which visitors ascended to what Ross named The Old Curiosity Shop.
Ross was a frequent visitor, for he had taken to returning to Canada several times a year, to give a lecture here, offer advice to an aspiring municipal or provincial gallery there, and contribute articles to Canadian periodicals on the state of art and the dizzy ascent of art prices in the international sale-rooms. He brought Francis the gossip of the art world—the sort of thing that could not be printed—and stories about its personalities, some of whom were people Francis had watched on behalf of Uncle Jack. Not that Francis ever mentioned his real London work to Ross; he was as close-mouthed as ever about that, and he was expert in deflecting delicate inquiries that might give a hint as to the extent of his fortune. But it could not be concealed that he was rich, and very rich, for such eccentricity as he was developing could not be sustained by less than a large fortune. He bought pictures at Christie’s and Sotheby’s at high prices, and although he did so through an agent, Ross was the kind of man who could ferret out who the real buyer was.
What Ross did not know was that such heavy purchasing was Francis’s way of assuaging the great yearning he felt to paint himself. More than once he tried to find a new style, and every time he gave it up in disgust. The Mothers would not speak to him in a contemporary voice.
Ross’s preoccupation with the art world of Canada, which might have puzzled a less astute person, was no mystery to Francis. Ross wanted to be the Director of the National Gallery in Ottawa, and to secure such an appointment it was well to lay his plans some years ahead of the event.
“I really am a Canadian, you know,” he said; “a Canadian in my bones, and I want to do something important here. I want to raise the Gallery to a level of world importance, which it isn’t now. Of course, it has some fine things. The collection of eighteenth-century drawings is enviable, and there are other good individual holdings. But not enough. Not nearly enough. The buying has usually been unexceptionable in terms of a budget that is simply derisory; but there is far too much that has merely been donated, and we know what that can mean, in a country without many real connoisseurs. It’s hard to turn down donations, or to stick ‘em in the cellar when you’ve got ‘em. Too many feelings to be hurt. But the time must come. There must be some ruthless weeding and some major buying.—Look here, Frank, what are you going to do with the best of what you have?”