As they chattered learnedly, assuring each other that they had had some uneasiness about the monkey, Letztpfennig was understandably undergoing great stress. The big guard brought him a chair, and he sat on it and drew his breath painfully. But he regained his self-possession, rose to his feet, clapped his hands authoritatively, like a professor calling a class to order.
“Gentlemen,” said he, “you shall know that I painted this picture. Why did I do so? In part as a protest against the fanatical adoration that is accorded to our Dutch masters of an earlier day, that is so frequently linked with a depreciation of modern painters. It is a bad principle that nothing may be praised without dispraising something else. Nobody nowadays can paint like the Old Masters! That is untrue. I have done so, and I know there are many others who could do it as well as I. It is not done, of course, because it is a kind of artistic fancy-dress, an insincerity, an imitation of another man’s style. I fully agree that a painter should work in the mode—speaking very generally—of his own time. But that is not because it is a degenerate mode, adopted because he cannot paint as well as his great artistic predecessors.
“Now listen to me patiently, if you please. You have all praised this painting for its skill in colour and design, and its power to lift the heart as only a great picture can do. At one time or another you have all spoken highly of it, and several of you have professed yourselves delighted with it. What delighted you? The magic of a great name? The magic of the past? Or was it the picture before your eyes? Even you, Mr. Thresher, before you found that under no circumstances could you buy this picture for your great client, spoke of it to me in terms that made my heart sing in my breast. The work of a very great master, you said, if not indubitably a van Eyck. Well—? I am the very great master. Do you take back everything you said?”
Thresher said nothing, and none of the other experts were inclined to speak, except Baudoin, who was hissing in Belmann’s ear that he had never trusted the craquelure.
It was the Judge who spoke, and he spoke like a judge. “We must bear in mind, Mynheer Letztpfennig, that you offered the picture for sale as a genuine van Eyck, and with it you offered a tale about its origins which we now know to be untrue. That cannot be explained away as part of a protest on behalf of the skill of modern painters.”
“But how else was I to get attention for my picture? How else was I to make my point? If I had made it known that Jean-Paul Letztpfennig, professor of art, restorer of Old Masters, known as a painter condemned to mediocrity by those who profess to rank artists as if they were schoolboys, had painted a great painting in an old style, how many of you would have crossed your doorstep to see it? Not one! Not one! But as things are you have used words like masterpiece, and transporting beauty. At what were they directed? Toward what you saw, or merely toward what you thought you saw?”
“The Judge is right,” said Addison Thresher. “You wanted the top dollar for your picture, not only for its beauty—which I don’t deny—but for the glamour of age and a great name. And we fell for it! It’s a fine painting, but where can you sell it? I guess it’s a draw. Certainly so far as I am concerned, it’s a draw.”
Of course, it wasn’t a draw, and the international press turned it into a sensation. How did they find out what had happened? When eleven men are in a room and something of unusual interest takes place, at least one of them is likely to let something drop which the press seizes on, and the hunt is up. The one who was supposed to have leaked the story was Sluyters, the guard, who was not nearly so impassive as he looked, and who would have been glad to tell what he knew for a consideration. But did nobody else say a word? Certainly Francis didn’t until he was back at Düsterstein, but who can answer for Addison Thresher? Did the Judge drop a word to his wife, who may have told an intimate friend in the uttermost confidence? The Germans certainly were not silent when they reported to their superiors, and through them to the Reichsmarschall, who was not known for being close-mouthed. The two Frenchmen and the Belgian would not be inclined toward silence; they had risked little and gained much, for they had been in on a great unmasking which gave the international art world something to talk about for many months.
“Monkey Blows Hoax” was the headline in one form or another, and one paper carried a caricature of Francis instructing the experts, based on a famous painting of the Boy Christ Teaching in the Temple.
“I see that the Letztpfennig file is now closed,” said Saraceni, raising his eyes from the Völkischer Beobachter he had been reading in the shell-grotto.
“Are they dropping all charges?” said Francis.
“No charges are effective now. He has killed himself.”
“Oh God! The poor devil!”
“Do not reproach yourself, Corniche. I told you to kill him, and you killed him. You destroyed him professionally on my instruction and now he has yielded up his life of his own volition. In a very interesting way, too. He lived in Amsterdam in one of those lovely old houses on a canal. You know how they have projecting mounts for cranes hanging over the canal bank, so that in the old days those merchant houses could have goods hauled up to the top floor for storage? Picturesque old things. It seems Letztpfennig hanged himself on his crane, right out over the canal. When he was retrieved by the police they found a note pinned to his coat. Oddly enough, he had worn his overcoat and hat to die in. The note said: ‘Let them say what they will now; in the beginning they said it was a great picture.’—My dear man, are you unwell? Perhaps you had better take the day off. You have done quite enough for art, for the present.”
That was the making of Francis, said the Daimon Maimas.
–You are not gentle in your methods, brother, said the Lesser Zadkiel.
–Not always, but I am often subtle. It was I, of course, who nudged Francis to visit the zoo, and I made sure he had a good look at the monkeys.
–A bad moment for Letztpfennig.
–Letztpfennig was not my care. And he was not too badly used. He wanted fame and he wanted to he recognized as a great painter. He had both his wishes—posthumously. His death gave a note of pathos to what was, considering all things, a remarkable career. It was the rest of mankind that felt the pathos, as it usually is in pathetic fates. When everything is added up, Letztpfennig did not do too badly. He is a footnote in the history of art. And Francis gained at a stroke a very nice little reputation.
–And that was the fame that Ruth predicted? said the Lesser Zadkiel.
–Oh, by no means. I can do better than that, said the Daimon Maimas.
The downfall of Letztpfenning was of interest to the world, as somebody’s downfall always is, but by the autumn of 1938, not long after Francis’s twenty-ninth birthday, the Munich Crisis took precedence over all other news, and the apparent triumph of Neville Chamberlain in concluding an agreement with the German Führer gladdened the hearts of millions of innocents who wanted peace and were ready to believe anything that seemed to promise peace. But not everyone trusted that pact; the Countess and Saraceni were two of these. There was uneasiness and change at Düsterstein. Amalie was sent off to a distinguished school in Switzerland, and though Ruth Nibsmith stayed on to help the Countess in secretarial work, she knew that her time in that capacity was short, and before Christmas she had taken affectionate farewells of everyone and returned to England. Saraceni likewise found that he had imperative business in Rome, and could not say how long it would be before he returned—though he assured the Countess that he would certainly return. And the Countess announced that pressing work in Munich, relating to her sales of farm produce, would keep her in that city for several weeks and perhaps for months.
Saraceni and Francis had, between them, in the year past, completed a substantial amount of work, some of which was ambitious. Bigger and bigger pictures were making their way to the wine merchants’ cellars—pictures so large the canvases had to be dismounted from their stretchers, and packed around the insides of the big barrels, carefully wrapped to protect them from the wine. The stretchers and the old nails that belonged to the pictures travelled in two large bags of golf clubs, which Prince Max had added to his luggage. These were ambitious pictures of battle scenes, and a number of portraits of minor historical figures, all greatly improved by Saraceni and also by Francis, who was trusted with increasingly significant work. What was to become of Francis during the Meister’s long absence? The day before he left, Saraceni told him.