Tales of Men and Ghosts Part 11

He had run over to London for his annual "look-round"--I fancy one or another of the big collectors usually paid his journey--and when we met he was on his way to see the Daunt collection. You know old Daunt was a surly brute, and the things weren't easily seen; but he had heard Neave was in London, and had sent--yes, actually sent!--for him to come and give his opinion on a few bits, including the Diana. The little man bore himself discreetly, but you can imagine his pride. In his exultation he asked me to come with him--"Oh, I've the _grandes et pet.i.tes entrees_, my dear fellow: I've made my conditions--" and so it happened that I saw the first meeting between Humphrey Neave and his fate.

For that collection _was_ his fate: or, one may say, it was embodied in the Diana who was queen and G.o.ddess of the realm. Yes--I shall always be glad I was with Neave when he had his first look at the Diana. I see him now, blinking at her through his white lashes, and stroking his seedy wisp of a moustache to hide a twitch of the muscles. It was all very quiet, but it was the _coup de foudre_. I could see that by the way his hands trembled when he turned away and began to examine the other things. You remember Neave's hands--thin, sallow, dry, with long inquisitive fingers thrown out like antennae? Whatever they hold--bronze or lace, hard enamel or brittle gla.s.s--they have an air of conforming themselves to the texture of the thing, and sucking out of it, by every finger-tip, the mysterious essence it has secreted. Well, that day, as he moved about among Daunt's treasures, the Diana followed him everywhere. He didn't look back at her--he gave himself to the business he was there for--but whatever he touched, he felt her. And on the threshold he turned and gave her his first free look--the kind of look that says: _"You're mine."_

It amused me at the time--the idea of little Neave making eyes at any of Daunt's belongings. He might as well have coquetted with the Kohinoor.

And the same idea seemed to strike him; for as we turned away from the big house in Belgravia he glanced up at it and said, with a bitterness I'd never heard in him: "Good Lord! To think of that lumpy fool having those things to handle! Did you notice his stupid stumps of fingers? I suppose he blunted them gouging nuggets out of the gold fields. And in exchange for the nuggets he gets all that in a year--only has to hold out his callous palm to have that great ripe sphere of beauty drop into it! That's my idea of heaven--to have a great collection drop into one's hand, as success, or love, or any of the big shining things, drop suddenly on some men. And I've had to worry along for nearly fifty years, saving and paring, and haggling and intriguing, to get here a bit and there a bit--and not one perfection in the lot! It's enough to poison a man's life."

The outbreak was so unlike Neave that I remember every word of it: remember, too, saying in answer: "But, look here, Neave, you wouldn't take Daunt's hands for yours, I imagine?"

He stared a moment and smiled. "Have all that, and grope my way through it like a blind cave fish? What a question! But the sense that it's always the blind fish that live in that kind of aquarium is what makes anarchists, sir!" He looked back from the corner of the square, where we had paused while he delivered himself of this remarkable metaphor. "G.o.d, I'd like to throw a bomb at that place, and be in at the looting!"

And with that, on the way home, he unpacked his grievance--pulled the bandage off the wound, and showed me the ugly mark it had made on his little white soul.

It wasn't the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him--it was the inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy of the discrepancy between a man's wants and his power to gratify them. Neave's taste was too exquisite for his means--was like some strange, delicate, capricious animal, that he cherished and pampered and couldn't satisfy.

"Don't you know those little glittering lizards that die if they're not fed on some wonderful tropical fly? Well, my taste's like that, with one important difference--if it doesn't get its fly, it simply turns and feeds on me. Oh, it doesn't die, my taste--worse luck! It gets larger and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a bigger bite of me--that's all."

That was all. Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations--as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses--only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable--that he was never to know the last deep identification which only possession can give. He had trained himself in short, to feel, in the rare great thing--such an utterance of beauty as the Daunt Diana, say--a hundred elements of perfection, a hundred _reasons why_, imperceptible, inexplicable even, to the average "artistic" sense; he had reached this point by a long austere process of discrimination and rejection, the renewed great refusals of the intelligence which perpetually asks more, which will make no pact with its self of yesterday, and is never to be beguiled from its purpose by the wiles of the next-best-thing. Oh, it's a poignant case, but not a common one; for the next-best-thing usually wins...

You see, the worst of Neave's state was the fact of his not being a mere collector, even the collector raised to his highest pitch of efficiency.

The whole thing was blent in him with poetry--his imagination had romanticized the acquisitive instinct, as the religious feeling of the Middle Ages turned pa.s.sion into love. And yet his could never be the abstract enjoyment of the philosopher who says: "This or that object is really mine because I'm capable of appreciating it." Neave _wanted_ what he appreciated--wanted it with his touch and his sight as well as with his imagination.

It was hardly a year afterward that, coming back from a long tour in India, I picked up a London paper and read the amazing headline: "Mr.

Humphrey Neave buys the Daunt collection"... I rubbed my eyes and read again. Yes, it could only be our old friend Humphrey. "An American living in Rome ... one of our most discerning collectors"; there was no mistaking the description. I clapped on my hat and bolted out to see the first dealer I could find; and there I had the incredible details. Neave had come into a fortune--two or three million dollars, ama.s.sed by an uncle who had a corset-factory, and who had attained wealth as the creator of the Mystic Super-straight. (Corset-factory sounds odd, by the way, doesn't it? One had fancied that the corset was a personal, a highly specialized garment, more or less shaped on the form it was to modify; but, after all, the Tanagras were all made from two or three moulds--and so, I suppose, are the ladies who wear the Mystic Super-straight.)

The uncle had a son, and Neave had never dreamed of seeing a penny of the money; but the son died suddenly, and the father followed, leaving a codicil that gave everything to our friend. Humphrey had to go out to "realize" on the corset-factory; and his description of _that_ ... Well, he came back with his money in his pocket, and the day he landed old Daunt went to smash. It all fitted in like a Chinese puzzle. I believe Neave drove straight from Euston to Daunt House: at any rate, within two months the collection was his, and at a price that made the trade sit up. Trust old Daunt for that!

I was in Rome the following spring, and you'd better believe I looked him up. A big porter glared at me from the door of the Palazzo Neave: I had almost to produce my pa.s.sport to get in. But that wasn't Neave's fault--the poor fellow was so beset by people clamouring to see his collection that he had to barricade himself, literally. When I had mounted the state _Scalone_, and come on him, at the end of half a dozen echoing saloons, in the farthest, smallest _reduit_ of the vast suite, I received the same welcome that he used to give us in his little den over the wine shop.

"Well--so you've got her?" I said. For I'd caught sight of the Diana in pa.s.sing, against the bluish blur of an old _verdure_--just the background for her poised loveliness. Only I rather wondered why she wasn't in the room where he sat.

He smiled. "Yes, I've got her," he returned, more calmly than I had expected.

"And all the rest of the loot?"

"Yes. I had to buy the lump."

"Had to? But you wanted to, didn't you? You used to say it was your idea of heaven--to stretch out your hand and have a great ripe sphere of beauty drop into it. I'm quoting your own words, by the way."

Neave blinked and stroked his seedy moustache. "Oh, yes. I remember the phrase. It's true--it _is_ the last luxury." He paused, as if seeking a pretext for his lack of warmth. "The thing that bothered me was having to move. I couldn't cram all the stuff into my old quarters."

"Well, I should say not! This is rather a better setting."

He got up. "Come and take a look round. I want to show you two or three things--new attributions I've made. I'm doing the catalogue over."

The interest of showing me the things seemed to dispel the vague apathy I had felt in him. He grew keen again in detailing his redistribution of values, and above all in convicting old Daunt and his advisers of their repeated aberrations of judgment. "The miracle is that he should have got such things, knowing as little as he did what he was getting. And the egregious a.s.ses who bought for him were no better, were worse in fact, since they had all sorts of humbugging wrong reasons for admiring what old Daunt simply coveted because it belonged to some other rich man."

Never had Neave had so wondrous a field for the exercise of his perfected faculty; and I saw then how in the real, the great collector's appreciations the keenest scientific perception is suffused with imaginative sensibility, and how it's to the latter undefinable quality that in the last resort he trusts himself.

Nevertheless, I still felt the shadow of that hovering apathy, and he knew I felt it, and was always breaking off to give me reasons for it.

For one thing, he wasn't used to his new quarters--hated their bigness and formality; then the requests to show his things drove him mad. "The women--oh, the women!" he wailed, and interrupted himself to describe a heavy-footed German Princess who had marched past his treasures as if she were inspecting a cavalry regiment, applying an unmodulated _Mugneeficent_ to everything from the engraved gems to the Hercules torso.

"Not that she was half as bad as the other kind," he added, as if with a last effort at optimism. "The kind who discriminate and say: 'I'm not sure if it's Botticelli or Cellini I mean, but _one of that school_, at any rate.' And the worst of all are the ones who know--up to a certain point: have the schools, and the dates and the jargon pat, and yet wouldn't know a Phidias if it stood where they hadn't expected it."

He had all my sympathy, poor Neave; yet these were trials inseparable from the collector's lot, and not always without their secret compensations. Certainly they did not wholly explain my friend's att.i.tude; and for a moment I wondered if it were due to some strange disillusionment as to the quality of his treasures. But no! the Daunt collection was almost above criticism; and as we pa.s.sed from one object to another I saw there was no mistaking the genuineness of Neave's pride in his possessions. The ripe sphere of beauty was his, and he had found no flaw in it as yet...

A year later came the amazing announcement--the Daunt collection was for sale. At first we all supposed it was a case of weeding out (though how old Daunt would have raged at the thought of anybody's weeding _his_ collection!) But no--the catalogue corrected that idea. Every stick and stone was to go under the hammer. The news ran like wildfire from Rome to Berlin, from Paris to London and New York. Was Neave ruined, then?

Wrong again--the dealers nosed that out in no time. He was simply selling because he chose to sell; and in due time the things came up at Christie's.

But you may be sure the trade had found an answer to the riddle; and the answer was that, on close inspection, Neave had found the collection less impeccable than he had supposed. It was a preposterous answer--but then there was no other. Neave, by this time, was pretty generally recognized as having the subtlest _flair_ of any collector in Europe, and if he didn't choose to keep the Daunt collection it could be only because he had reason to think he could do better.

In a flash this report had gone the rounds and the buyers were on their guard. I had run over to London to see the thing through, and it was the queerest sale I ever was at. Some of the things held their own, but a lot--and a few of the best among them--went for half their value. You see, they'd been locked up in old Daunt's house for nearly twenty years, and hardly shown to any one, so that the whole younger generation of dealers and collectors knew of them only by hearsay. Then you know the effect of suggestion in such cases. The undefinable sense we were speaking of is a ticklish instrument, easily thrown out of gear by a sudden fall of temperature; and the sharpest experts grow shy and self-distrustful when the cold current of depreciation touches them. The sale was a slaughter--and when I saw the Daunt Diana fall at the wink of a little third-rate _brocanteur_ from Vienna I turned sick at the folly of my kind.

For my part, I had never believed that Neave had sold the collection because he'd "found it out"; and within a year my incredulity was justified. As soon as the things were put in circulation they were known for the marvels they are. There was hardly a poor bit in the lot; and my wonder grew at Neave's madness. All over Europe, dealers began to be fighting for the spoils; and all kinds of stuff were palmed off on the unsuspecting as fragments of the Daunt collection!

Meanwhile, what was Neave doing? For a long time I didn't hear, and chance kept me from returning to Rome. But one day, in Paris, I ran across a dealer who had captured for a song one of the best Florentine bronzes in the Daunt collection--a marvellous _plaquette_ of Donatello's. I asked him what had become of it, and he said with a grin: "I sold it the other day," naming a price that staggered me.

"Ye G.o.ds! Who paid you that for it?"

His grin broadened, and he answered: "Neave."

"_ Neave?_ Humphrey Neave?"

"Didn't you know he was buying back his things?"

"Nonsense!"

"He is, though. Not in his own name--but he's doing it."

And he _was_, do you know--and at prices that would have made a sane man shudder! A few weeks later I ran across his tracks in London, where he was trying to get hold of a Penicaud enamel--another of his scattered treasures. Then I hunted him down at his hotel, and had it out with him.

"Look here, Neave, what are you up to?"

He wouldn't tell me at first: stared and laughed and denied. But I took him off to dine, and after dinner, while we smoked, I happened to mention casually that I had a pull over the man who had the Penicaud--and at that he broke down and confessed.

"Yes, I'm buying them back, Finney--it's true." He laughed nervously, twitching his moustache. And then he let me have the story.

"You know how I'd hungered and thirsted for the _real thing_--you quoted my own phrase to me once, about the 'ripe sphere of beauty.' So when I got my money, and Daunt lost his, almost at the same moment, I saw the hand of Providence in it. I knew that, even if I'd been younger, and had more time, I could never hope, nowadays, to form such a collection as _that_. There was the ripe sphere, within reach; and I took it. But when I got it, and began to live with it, I found out my mistake. It was a _mariage de convenance_--there'd been no wooing, no winning. Each of my little old bits--the rubbish I chucked out to make room for Daunt's glories--had its own personal history, the drama of my relation to it, of the discovery, the struggle, the capture, the first divine moment of possession. There was a romantic secret between us. And then I had absorbed its beauties one by one, they had become a part of my imagination, they held me by a hundred threads of far-reaching a.s.sociation. And suddenly I had expected to create this kind of intense personal tie between myself and a roomful of new cold alien presences--things staring at me vacantly from the depths of unknown pasts! Can you fancy a more preposterous hope? Why, my other things, my _own_ things, had wooed me as pa.s.sionately as I wooed them: there was a certain little bronze, a little Venus Callipyge, who had drawn me, drawn me, drawn me, imploring me to rescue her from her unspeakable surroundings in a vulgar bric-a-brac shop at Biarritz, where she shrank out of sight among sham Sevres and Dutch silver, as one has seen certain women--rare, shy, exquisite--made almost invisible by the vulgar splendours surrounding them. Well! that little Venus, who was just a specious seventeenth century attempt at the 'antique,' but who had penetrated me with her pleading grace, touched me by the easily guessed story of her obscure, anonymous origin, was more to me imaginatively--yes! more than the cold bought beauty of the Daunt Diana..."

"The Daunt Diana!" I broke in. "Hold up, Neave--_the Daunt Diana?_"

He smiled contemptuously. "A professional beauty, my dear fellow--expected every head to be turned when she came into a room."

"Oh, Neave," I groaned.

"Yes, I know. You're thinking of what we felt that day we first saw her in London. Many a poor devil has sold his soul as the result of such a first sight! Well, I sold _her_ instead. Do you want the truth about her? _Elle etait bete a pleurer._"

He laughed, and stood up with a little shrug of disenchantment.

"And so you're impenitent?" I paused. "And yet you're buying some of the things back?"