Buried Alive: a Tale of These Days Part 22

Priam paused. "I agree with you," said he.

"Farll," said Mr. Oxford, "is about the only modern painter that can stand the company that that picture has in this room, eh?"

Priam blushed. "Yes," he said.

There is a considerable difference, in various matters, between Putney and Volterra; but the picture of Volterra and the picture of Putney High Street were obviously, strikingly, incontestably, by the same hand; one could not but perceive the same brush-work, the same ma.s.ses, the same manner of seeing and of grasping, in a word the same dazzling and austere translation of nature. The resemblance jumped at one and shook one by the shoulders. It could not have escaped even an auctioneer. Yet Mr. Oxford did not refer to it. He seemed quite blind to it. All he said was, as they left the room, and Priam finished his rather monosyllabic praise--

"Yes, that's the little collection I've just got together, and I am very proud to have shown it to you. Now I want you to come and lunch with me at my club. Please do. I should be desolated if you refused."

Priam did not care a halfpenny about the desolation of Mr. Oxford; and he most sincerely objected to lunch at Mr. Oxford's club. But he said "Yes" because it was the easiest thing for his shyness to do, Mr. Oxford being a determined man. Priam was afraid to go. He was disturbed, alarmed, affrighted, by the mystery of Mr. Oxford's silence.

They arrived at the club in the car.

_The Club_

Priam had never been in a club before. The statement may astonish, may even meet with incredulity, but it is true. He had left the land of clubs early in life. As for the English clubs in European towns, he was familiar with their exteriors, and with the amiable babble of their supporters at _tables d'hote,_ and his desire for further knowledge had not been so hot as to inconvenience him. Hence he knew nothing of clubs.

Mr. Oxford's club alarmed and intimidated him; it was so big and so black. Externally it resembled a town-hall of some great industrial town. As you stood on the pavement at the bottom of the flight of giant steps that led to the first pair of swinging doors, your head was certainly lower than the feet of a being who examined you sternly from the other side of the gla.s.s. Your head was also far below the sills of the mighty windows of the ground-floor. There were two storeys above the ground-floor, and above them a projecting eave of carven stone that threatened the uplifted eye like a menace. The tenth part of a slate, the merest chip of a corner, falling from the lofty summit of that pile, would have slain elephants. And all the facade was black, black with ages of carbonic deposit. The notion that the building was a town-hall that had got itself misplaced and perverted gradually left you as you gazed. You perceived its falseness. You perceived that Mr. Oxford's club was a monument, a relic of the days when there were giants on earth, that it had come down unimpaired to a race of pigmies, who were making the best of it. The sole descendant of the giants was the scout behind the door. As Mr. Oxford and Priam climbed towards it, this unique giant, with a giant's force, pulled open the gigantic door, and Mr. Oxford and Priam walked imperceptibly in, and the door swung to with a large displacement of air. Priam found himself in an immense interior, under a distant carved ceiling, far, far upwards, like heaven. He watched Mr.

Oxford write his name in a gigantic folio, under a gigantic clock. This accomplished, Mr. Oxford led him past enormous vistas to right and left, into a very long chamber, both of whose long walls were studded with thousands upon thousands of ma.s.sive hooks--and here and there upon a hook a silk hat or an overcoat. Mr. Oxford chose a couple of hooks in the expanse, and when they had divested themselves sufficiently he led Priam forwards into another great chamber evidently meant to recall the baths of Carcalla. In gigantic basins chiselled out of solid granite, Priam scrubbed his finger-nails with a nail-brush larger than he had previously encountered, even in nightmares, and an attendant brushed his coat with a utensil that resembled a weapon of offence lately the property of Anak.

"Shall we go straight to the dining-room now," asked Mr. Oxford, "or will you have a gin and angostura first?"

Priam declined the gin and angostura, and they went up an overwhelming staircase of sombre marble, and through other apartments to the dining-room, which would have made an excellent riding-school. Here one had six of the gigantic windows in a row, each with curtains that fell in huge folds from the unseen into the seen. The ceiling probably existed. On every wall were gigantic paintings in thick ornate frames, and between the windows stood heroic busts of marble set upon columns of basalt. The chairs would have been immovable had they not run on castors of weight-resisting rock, yet against the tables they had the air of negligible toys. At one end of the room was a sideboard that would not have groaned under an ox whole, and at the other a fire, over which an ox might have been roasted in its entirety, leaped under a mantelpiece upon which Goliath could not have put his elbows.

All was silent and grave; the floors were everywhere covered with heavy carpets which hushed all echoes. There was not the faintest sound.

Sound, indeed, seemed to be deprecated. Priam had already pa.s.sed the wide entrance to one illimitable room whose walls were clothed with warnings in gigantic letters: 'Silence.' And he had noticed that all chairs and couches were thickly padded and upholstered in soft leather, and that it was impossible to produce in them the slightest creak. At a casual glance the place seemed unoccupied, but on more careful inspection you saw midgets creeping about, or seated in easy-chairs that had obviously been made to hold two of them; these midgets were the members of the club, dwarfed into dolls by its tremendous dimensions. A strange and sinister race! They looked as though in the final stages of decay, and wherever their heads might rest was stretched a white cloth, so that their heads might not touch the spots sanctified by the heads of the mighty departed. They rarely spoke to one another, but exchanged regards of mutual distrust and scorn; and if by chance they did converse it was in tones of weary, brusque disillusion. They could at best descry each other but indistinctly in the universal pervading gloom--a gloom upon which electric lamps, shining dimly yellow in their vast l.u.s.tres, produced almost no impression. The whole establishment was buried in the past, dreaming of its t.i.tantic yore, when there were doubtless giants who could fill those fauteuils and stick their feet on those mantelpieces.

It was in such an environment that Mr. Oxford gave Priam to eat and to drink off little ordinary plates and out of tiny tumblers. No hint of the club's immemorial history in that excessively modern and excellent repast--save in the Stilton cheese, which seemed to have descended from the fine fruity days of some Homeric age, a cheese that Ulysses might have inaugurated. I need hardly say that the total effect on Priam's temperament was disastrous. (Yet how could the diplomatic Mr. Oxford have guessed that Priam had never been in a club before?) It induced in him a speechless anguish, and he would have paid a sum as gigantic as the club--he would have paid the very cheque in his pocket--never to have met Mr. Oxford. He was a far too sensitive man for a club, and his moods were incalculable. a.s.suredly Mr. Oxford had miscalculated the result of his club on Priam's humour; he soon saw his error.

"Suppose we take coffee in the smoking-room?" he said.

The populous smoking-room was the one part of the club where talking with a natural loudness was not a crime. Mr. Oxford found a corner fairly free from midgets, and they established themselves in it, and liqueurs and cigars accompanied the coffee. You could actually see midgets laughing outright in the mist of smoke; the chatter narrowly escaped being a din; and at intervals a diminutive boy entered and bawled the name of a midget at the top of his voice, Priam was suddenly electrified, and Mr. Oxford, very alert, noticed the electrification.

Mr. Oxford drank his coffee somewhat quickly, and then he leaned forward a little over the table, and put his moon-like face nearer to Priam's, and arranged his legs in a truly comfortable position beneath the table, and expelled a large quant.i.ty of smoke from his cigar. It was clearly the preliminary to a scene of confidence, the approach to the crisis to which he had for several hours been leading up.

Priam's heart trembled.

"What is your opinion, _maitre_," he asked, "of the ultimate value of Farll's pictures?"

Priam was in misery. Mr. Oxford's manner was deferential, amiable and expectant. But Priam did not know what to say. He only knew what he would do if he could have found the courage to do it: run away, recklessly, unceremoniously, out of that club.

"I--I don't know," said Priam, visibly whitening.

"Because I've bought a goodish few Farlls in my time," Mr. Oxford continued, "and I must say I've sold them well. I've only got that one left that I showed you this morning, and I've been wondering whether I should stick to it and wait for a possible further rise, or sell it at once."

"How much can you sell it for?" Priam mumbled.

"I don't mind telling you," said Mr. Oxford, "that I fancy I could sell it for a couple of thousand. It's rather small, but it's one of the finest in existence."

"I should sell it," said Priam, scarcely audible.

"You would? Well, perhaps you're right. It's a question, in my mind, whether some other painter may not turn up one of these days who would do that sort of thing even better than Farll did it. I could imagine the possibility of a really clever man coming along and imitating Farll so well that only people like yourself, _maitre_, and perhaps me, could tell the difference. It's just the kind of work that might be brilliantly imitated, if the imitator was clever enough, don't you think?"

"But what do you mean?" asked Priam, perspiring in his back.

"Well," said Mr. Oxford vaguely, "one never knows. The style might be imitated, and the market flooded with canvases practically as good as Farll's. n.o.body might find it out for quite a long time, and then there might be confusion in the public mind, followed by a sharp fall in prices. And the beauty of it is that the public wouldn't really be any the worse. Because an imitation that no one can distinguish from the original is naturally as good as the original. You take me? There's certainly a tremendous chance for a man who could seize it, and that's why I'm inclined to accept your advice and sell my one remaining Farll."

He smiled more and more confidentially. His gaze was charged with a secret meaning. He seemed to be suggesting unspeakable matters to Priam.

That bright face wore an expression which such faces wear on such occasions--an expression cheerfully insinuating that after all there is no right and no wrong--or at least that many things which the ordinary slave of convention would consider to be wrong are really right. So Priam read the expression.

"The dirty rascal wants me to manufacture imitations of myself for him!"

Priam thought, full of sudden, hidden anger. "He's known all along that there's no difference between what I sold him and the picture he's already had. He wants to suggest that we should come to terms. He's simply been playing a game with me up to now." And he said aloud, "I don't know that I _advise_ you to do anything. I'm not a dealer, Mr.

Oxford."

He said it in a hostile tone that ought to have silenced Mr. Oxford for ever, but it did not. Mr. Oxford curved away, like a skater into a new figure, and began to expatiate minutely upon the merits of the Volterra picture. He a.n.a.lyzed it in so much detail, and lauded it with as much justice, as though the picture was there before them. Priam was astonished at the man's exact.i.tude. "Scoundrel! He knows a thing or two!" reflected Priam grimly.

"You don't think I overpraise it, do you, _cher maitre?_ Mr. Oxford finished, still smiling.

"A little," said Priam.

If only Priam could have run away! But he couldn't! Mr. Oxford had him well in a corner. No chance of freedom! Besides, he was over fifty and stout.

"Ah! Now I was expecting you to say that! Do you mind telling me at what period you painted it?" Mr. Oxford inquired, very blandly, though his hands were clasped in a violent tension that forced the blood from the region of the knuckle-joints.

This was the crisis which Mr. Oxford had been leading up to! All the time Mr. Oxford's teethy smile had concealed a knowledge of Priam's ident.i.ty!

CHAPTER X

_The Secret_

"What do you mean?" asked Priam Farll. But he put the question weakly, and he might just as well have said, "I know what you mean, and I would pay a million pounds or so in order to sink through the floor." A few minutes ago he would only have paid five hundred pounds or so in order to run simply away. Now he wanted Maskelyne miracles to happen to him.

The universe seemed to be caving in about the ears of Priam Farll.

Mr. Oxford was still smiling; smiling, however, as a man holds his breath for a wager. You felt that he could not keep it up much longer.

"You _are_ Priam Farll, aren't you?" said Mr. Oxford in a very low voice.

"What makes you think I'm Priam Farll?"

"I think you are Priam Farll because you painted that picture I bought from you this morning, and I am sure that no one but Priam Farll could have painted it."