“Who would judge the result?”
“That’s the sticker. Not God, certainly, as the father of both leaders.”
Saraceni did praise Drollig Hansel, as both he and Francis now called the picture. He did more. Without declaring it to be so, he included Francis in a closer fellowship with himself, and as they worked he talked untiringly about what he believed to be the philosophy of art. It was a philosophy deformed by that disease so fatal to philosophers—personal experience.
The Countess also became more genial toward Francis. Not that she had ever treated him with anything but courtesy, but now she talked freely about what he and Saraceni were doing, and there were more of those conferences in her private room when Amalie and Miss Nibsmith had retired. The Countess wanted to improve the product she was exporting. If an original like Drollig Hansel was so well received, could not Saraceni bring about a greater change in some of the old pictures on which he was working?
“Surely you are not urging me toward fakery. Countess?”
“Certainly not. Just a little more boldness, Meister.”
In the course of these talks things leaked out that gave Francis a better idea of what was actually involved in what he could not help considering an elaborate fraud. The Countess and Saraceni were receiving, for the pictures they sent, a full quarter of whatever the dealers could get for the Italian pictures the German museums offered in exchange, and the prices made his eyes start in his head. Where was the money going? Not to Düsterstein; nothing so direct or so dangerous. To Swiss banks, and by no means all to one bank.
“A quarter is not too much,” said the Countess. “After all, that is what Bernard Berenson gets for a mere letter of authentication when he writes it for Duveen. We provide the actual works of art and all the authentication they need is the approval of the great German experts who buy them—who must be assumed to know what they are doing.”
“Sometimes I wonder if they don’t know more than they are telling,” said Saraceni.
“They are working under the gleaming eye of the Reichsmarschall,” said the Countess, “and he expects them to deliver the goods. And some of the goods—the choicest pieces—are said to find their way into the Reichsmarschall’s personal collection, which is large and fine.”
“The whole thing sounds crooked as a dog’s hind leg,” said Francis, falling into the idiom of Blairlogie.
“If that is so, which I do not admit, we are not the leaders in the deception,” said the Countess.
“You do not see it as dishonest?”
“If it were a simple matter of business, I would think so,” said the Countess, “but it is far from simple. I see it as a matter of natural justice. My family lost everything—well, not quite everything, but a very great deal—in the War, and lost it willingly for Germany. Since 1932 my Germany has been whittled away until I no longer know it, and my task in rebuilding my family’s fortunes has been made unbelievably hard. And why? Because I am the wrong kind of aristocrat, which is something much nearer to a democrat than National Socialism can endure. Do you know what an aristocrat is, Mr. Cornish?”
“I know the concept, certainly.”
“I know the reality. An aristocrat, when my family rose to prominence, was someone who gained power and wealth through ability, and that meant daring and taking chances, not steering a careful course through a labyrinth of rules that had been made for their own benefit by people without either daring or ability. You know my family’s motto? You have seen it often enough.”
“Du sollst sterben ehe ich sterbe,” said Francis.
“Yes, and what does it mean? It is not one of your nineteenth-century, bourgeois mottoes—a mealy-mouthed assertion of a tradesman’s idea of splendour. It means: ‘Thou shalt perish ere I perish.’ And I do not mean to perish. That is why I am doing what I am doing.”
“The Countess seems to have decided to march under the banner of the Devil,” said Francis to the Meister.
“We all meet the Devil in different forms, and the Countess is sure that she has found him in the Führer.”
“A dangerous conclusion for a German citizen.”
“The Countess would be surprised if you defined her as a citizen. She told you what she was: an aristocrat, a daring survivor. Certainly not a drivelling eccentric, as P. G. Wodehouse would have it.”
“But suppose Hitler is right? Suppose the Reich lasts for a thousand years?”
“As an Italian I am sceptical of claims to last for a thousand years according to any plan; Italy has lasted far longer chiefly by muddle and indirection, and how gloriously she has done it. Of course, we have our own buffoon at present, but Italy has seen many buffoons come and go.”
“I gather I am being invited to march under the Countess’s banner? The Devil’s banner.”
“You can do that, Corniche, or you can go back to your frozen country, with its frozen art, and paint winter lakes and wind-blown pine trees, to which the Devil is understandably indifferent.”
“You suggest that I shall have missed my chance?”
“You will certainly have missed your chance to learn what I can teach you.”
“Really? You forget that now I can mix paint, and prepare grounds on the best principles, and I have painted one picture which seems to have met with a good deal of approval.”
Saraceni laid down his brush and applauded gently. “Now that is what I have been hoping to hear for quite a while. Some show of spirit. Some real artist’s self-esteem. Have you read and reread Vasari’s Lives of the Painters as I told you?”
“You know I have.”
“Yes, but attentively? If so, you must have been struck by the spirit of those men. Lions, all the best of them, even the gentle Raphael. They may have doubted their own work at bad moments, but they did not allow anyone else to do so. If a patron doubted, they changed patrons, because they knew they had something wholly beyond anybody’s power to command—a strong individual talent. You have been hinting and maneuvering to get me to say that Drollig Hansel is a fine painting. And I have. After all, you have been drawing and painting for—what—nineteen years? You have had good masters. Drollig Hansel will do, for the present. It’s a pretty good painting. It shows that you, nipped by the frosty weather of your homeland, and stifled by the ingenious logic-chopping of Oxford, have at last begun to know yourself and respect what you know. Well—there have been late bloomers before you. But if you think you have learned all I can teach you, think again. Technique—yes, you have a measure of that. The inner conviction—not yet. But now you are in a frame of mind where we can begin on that paramount necessity.”
This sounded promising, but Francis had learned to mistrust Saraceni’s promises; the Italian not only reproduced faithfully the painting technique of an earlier day, but also the harsh, unappeasable spirit of a Renaissance master toward his apprentice. What new trial could he possibly devise?
“What do you see here?” The Meister stood ten feet away from Francis and unrolled a piece of paper, obviously old.
“It seems to be a careful pen drawing of the head of Christ on the Cross.”
“Yes. Now come nearer. You see how it is done? It is calligraphy. A picture rendered in exquisite, tiny Gothic script in such a way that it depicts Christ’s agony, while writing out every word—and not one word more—of Christ’s Passion as it is recorded in the Gospel of St. John, chapters seventeen to nineteen. What do you think of it?”
“An interesting curiosity.”
“A work of art, of craft, of devotion. Done, I suppose, by some seventeenth-century chaplain, or tutor to the Ingelheim family. Take it, and study it closely. Then I want you to do something in the same manner, but your text shall be the Nativity of Our Lord, as recorded in Luke’s Gospel, chapter one, and chapter two up to verse thirty-two. I want a Nativity in calligraphy, and I make only one concession to your weakness: you may do it in Italic, rather than Gothic. So sharpen your quills, boil yourself some ink of soot and oak-galls, and go to work.”