BOOK FOUR
Money Grows on Trees
16
Contend for Homer Dead
I
More than once Lanny had said to his mother: “I think we ought to do something about Marcel’s paintings.” He would say: “I don’t want to live on Robbie the rest of my life, and I think he’d respect me more if I showed him I could make some money.” It had been agreed between them that when any of the works were sold the proceeds would be divided into three parts, the third to be kept for Marceline’s dot.
One day Emily Chattersworth phoned and invited Lanny over to lunch at Sept Chênes. “There’s a man coming I think you’ll like to meet. He’s an art expert, and he’s heard about Marcel’s work. I won’t invite anybody else, so you can have a chance to get acquainted.”
Thus came Zoltan Kertezsi, a middle-aged Hungarian who had been taken to New York as a child and since then had lived all over the world. His father was an engraver and the family was musical, so Kertezsi had grown up with art; he was an excellent violinist, and when Lanny told him about Kurt and his work he was so much interested that he forgot about Marcel for a while. He was a man with a kind and gentle face, and fair hair and mustache; his graciousness was somewhat airy; he moved with a kind of lightness so that at first you might think he was affected, but you discovered that it was the expression of a personality. He loved delicate and refined things, and had spent his life seeking them, studying and savoring them.
The profession of art expert was a new one to Lanny, and he listened with interest while this rapid and eager talker explained it with humor and the opposite of pretense. He described himself as a sort of upper servant to the rich, new or old, a culture-tutor to grown-up children, a guide and bodyguard to amateur explorers of a field where more snares were laid for their feet than had ever existed in the defenses of the Meuse-Argonne. This was a new view of the art world to Lanny; he had thought of a painting as something to look at and enjoy, but Kertezsi said that was very naive—a painting was something to be sold to a pork merchant or the dowager empress of a chain-store system, persons who had acquired huge sums of money in a short time and were seeking some way to distinguish themselves. The crimes committed in the course of selling art-works to them were more numerous than would ever be listed by the Sûreté Générate. Kertezsi didn’t say that he was one of the few honest experts in Europe, but that was the impression his conversation gave. He was simple, swift, and precise in his judgments, and Lanny was delighted to follow wherever his conversation led.
It led to Guatemala, Tibet, and Central Africa, where Kertezsi had traveled seeking native works for museums. He had climbed to monasteries in high mountains, and discovered long-buried palaces in jungles and deserts. He had had strange adventures, and liked to tell about them. He loved every beautiful thing that he had ever bought or sold, and would describe each with ecstatic words and airily gesticulating hands. He would become so absorbed in telling how he had found a great David or Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel, and by what extraordinary luck he had been able to purchase it, that he would forget all about his mostele à l’anglaise, and Mrs. Emily’s considerate butler would leave his plate to the last moment, hoping he would remember what he was there for.
II
Lanny decided that this was a man he wanted to know; so after luncheon he took him over to Bienvenu and introduced him to Beauty and to Kurt, and took him down to the studio and opened the storeroom of paintings. This, too, was an adventure, for by the magic of art Marcel Detaze, burned up in the fires of battle, came back, sat with them, and told them the intimate secrets of his soul; he made a new friend, and to Lanny it was more exciting to see this happen than it was to make one for himself.
The introduction was carried on chronologically. First, those lovely paintings of the Cap, in which a son of the cold north had expressed his delight in sunshine and color; the blue and green sea lifting itself heavily, breaking into curves of white foam or showers of sapphire flame. “How he loves it!” exclaimed Kertezsi. “You see how passionately he paints; he is trying to say something that he cannot say; perhaps he will never be able to. But the man has talent, extraordinary talent. The whole Riviera is here. How could people fail to know this work?”
“He was a very shy man,” replied Lanny; “he didn’t know how to advertise his stuff, and was always more interested in trying to do something better.”
“We must find a way to make him known,” said the other. “You have a treasure here.”
Lanny brought out the scenes of Norway. Now the painter had gone into a strange world, and was awed by it; these waters were cold, these rocks were dark, and these people lived hard; it was a feat just to be alive on a Norwegian fiord. “They are all summer scenes,” said Kertezsi. “But you feel that he is thinking about winter.”
“He painted many of them in the winter, after he had come back.”
“His brushwork has become different. He is groping for a new technique. This isn’t the same water that he watched from the Cap, or the same paint that represents it.”
Then Greece and Africa. Lanny told about the cruise of the Bluebird, and how he and Marcel had felt, and what they had talked about. The other man knew all these places, and got the intense feeling that had been poured into the work: the melancholy of Greece and the hard, stern cruelty of the lands from which the corsairs had sailed, from which the slavers had raided across the deserts into the jungles since time more distant than the eye of history could reach. Marcel had lived alone in his little cottage on the Cap, painting these pictures while he waited for his beautiful blond mistress to come back to him, and pehaps the fear of a great sorrow had hung over him during this time.
Then the war, and the painter’s dreadful mutilation; so there was a new man to know. The art buyer had heard something of the story—perhaps Emily Chattersworth had told him. Lanny brought out the sketches which he had managed to keep his stepfather from destroying; and then one by one he set on the easel those war works into which Marcel had poured his horror, grief, and love of la patrie. That Soldier in Pain, tormented by the little Hun devils, which the painter had insisted was only a cartoon, but which Kertezsi now said was worthy of Daumier. That Fear, which the critic said could have been done by no one but William Blake at his best; that portrait of Beauty called Sister of Mercy, which Lanny said she would never sell and which Kertezsi predicted would be borrowed for exhibition all over the world if they knew about it.
“Really, Mr. Budd,” said the visitor, “it is a mistake not to let the public have this work. I don’t suppose you need the money, but I point out that, from the purely business point of view, if you let part of these treasures go, they will work for the rest. If you sell all but a small part, what you have left will in course of years become worth more than the whole thing if you keep it hidden.”
“We have often talked about putting some of them on the market,” assented Lanny. “How would you suggest going about it?”
“Suppose you begin with a test. Take one of these Riviera seascapes, just an average one, and put it up at a London auction room, say Christie’s, at one of their really good miscellaneous sales—a little later, when the foreigners are crowding into the hotels. I’ll do a little boosting in a quiet way—I mean. I’ll get some worthwhile people to look at it, and perhaps I can find some rich American friend to bid for it. You never can tell what may happen; the dealers get to whispering among themselves: ‘Zoltan Kertezsi is interested in that Detaze, he says he’s a coming man,’ and so on—that’s the way the game is played, and there’s no harm in it, because I really will be interested. You can put a minimum price on the picture if you wish, and if it fails to bring that, I’ll bid it in, and in that case you will only be out the commission of the auction room.”
“What do you charge for such a service, Mr. Kertezsi?”
“A flat ten percent, whether I am acting for the buyer or the seller. Many dealers will charge both parties, but that I have never done. If
you wish me to represent you and try to interest buyers, you may pay me; or if you prefer that I take a chance and try to find some one of my customers who will commission me to buy the picture at a certain price, I will do that.”
Said Lanny: “It will seem strange to be making a lot of money out of Marcel’s work, when he was able to make so little during his whole life.”
To which the other answered by quoting the couplet on the disputed birthplace of an ancient poet:
“Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.”
III
Rick hadn’t brought his family to the Riviera that winter, because his play had been accepted by one of the stage societies and he had to be on hand to assist in the production. That was something exciting, and Lanny wanted to see it; now he had a double excuse, because of this offer of Zoltan Kertezsi, which Beauty decided to accept. They picked out what they considered a good specimen of Marcel’s seascapes—Sea and Rocks, they named it—and the arrangement was made for it to be put up at auction just after Easter. That being the period when Marie went north, Lanny drove her, and then went on to London—the obliging ferry took your car across, so you spoke of motoring to London as if the Channel wasn’t there.
Rick’s play was just going into rehearsal, so he was in town and much occupied. Lanny went to the theater with him, and lived again those days in Connecticut when he had acted in one play and helped to stage another; memories swept over him—and they were intensified manifold when he chanced to looked over the list of plays showing in London and saw the announcement: “Phyllis Gracyn in the sensational New York success, All Things for Love.” “Well, well!” he thought. “She’s made good!” Indeed, that was the heights for an American actress, to be starred in a London production!
Lanny decided that he wanted to see her act, and persuaded Rick to go with him. Of course he had told his friend about the old love affair, and Rick was curious to have a look at the lady; as for Lanny—well, if you are going to be jilted and have your heart broken, let it be by somebody who is somebody!
The play wasn’t much, they agreed; a society drama, the conventional “triangle,” with Gracyn playing the part of a young music student who becomes involved with a married man and gives him up when she realizes that he cares more about his family’s reputation and social position than he does about love. The “star” herself was the life of the play; the same delicate boyish figure, seeming not a day older than when Lanny had held her in his arms nearly five years earlier. She had acquired poise and skill in putting her personality across; nothing could be more spontaneous than her gaiety, and her charm was controlled like water from a tap.
“I don’t wonder you fell for that,” said Rick. “Does she still cause you melancholy feelings?”
“I like what I have much better,” declared Lanny. “What sort of life would I have chasing about in the entourage of a stage queen?”
“Count yourself well out of it,’ agreed the other. “I’m having troubles with a stage queen myself just now.”
A few days later Lanny saw his old sweetheart having luncheon in the hotel where he was staying. She was with a fashionably dressed man and Lanny had no mind to interrupt, but she saw him and sent the waiter for him, so he went over to her table. The man to whom she introduced him was her producer, and Lanny wondered, was she playing the same old game? Not All Things for Love, but A Part for Love! She was showing her old friend off to her new, as Lanny had shown her off to Rick. She seemed delighted to see him—but he wondered, can you ever trust an actress? They learn to do these things on the stage, and can they keep from practicing off-stage? It was a case of once bit, twice shy.
He paid the customary compliments to her performance, and was prepared to go, but she wouldn’t have it so; she made him sit down—one didn’t give up old friends so lightly. She wanted him to know that success hadn’t gone to her head; she told the other man how Lanny had helped her in her struggling days, that bitter, lonely time when she had been a high school student, pining to get onto the stage but having no more idea how to set about it than if it was the pearly gates of heaven she wished to crash.
“How are you, Lanny, and what are you doing in London?” He told her that he had a friend with a new play; also a painting of his stepfather’s was to be sold at auction. “Oh, do they have auctions of paintings? Could I come and see it? I might buy one, just to show that I’m getting culture!”
“A lot of people buy them for that reason,” smiled the young man-about-town. “Naturally I’d be pleased to have you attend.” Zoltan Kertezsi had explained that it was important to have people looking at the picture and asking questions about it, especially prominent persons—and who could serve better than the star of a current stage hit?
IV
One thing Robbie Budd had always insisted upon in his travels: you must stop at the most expensive hotel in town, because that way you meet the people you need in your business. Now, being in business, Lanny learned how wise this precept was. Walking through the lobby, with its elaborate display of marble and brass and ormolu and plush, who should be passing but Harry Murchison, that plate-glass manufacturer who had come so close to kidnaping Beauty Budd and her son and carrying them away to his valley of smoke and steel! Nearly nine years had passed since that had happened, or rather failed to happen, and the young businessman from Pittsburgh had grown stouter and more serious than ever; but Lanny knew him at once, and the other had to stare for only a moment or two. He greeted his almost-stepson cordially, and asked the polite questions, how was his mother, and was she with him, and what was he doing. When Lanny told him, he said, in much the same spirit as Gracyn: “I’d be interested to see your stepfather’s painting. Could I come, and bring my wife?” Of course Lanny said he’d be delighted to meet Mrs. Murchison.
He wasn’t clear in his mind just how much Harry knew about Marcel Detaze. He had known that Beauty had a lover down on the Cap, but did he realize that this was the man? Had he told his wife about his adventure, or misadventure, in the far-off days before the war? That was one of their family secrets, into which Lanny was not expected to pry.
Adella Murchison was a tall, good-looking, youngish brunette who had been her husband’s secretary and still took that attitude, doing for him many of the things that secretaries do. They had three children at home, and Lanny knew that they had been married soon after Harry’s return to the States; he made a story out of it in his imagination: the heir of a fortune had lost his great love, and was lonely, and a woman employee had “caught him on the rebound,” as they say. Lanny liked her because she was straightforward and unpretentious; she said that she didn’t know much about painting, but would like to learn, and he gave her such instruction as time permitted.
The rooms of Christie’s are in a very old building on King Street, near St. James’s Palace. They are extraordinarily shabby, which tells you that they are so aristocratic that they don’t have to bother about looks; they are intended for persons so important that their clothes look as if they had been slept in, and who carry rolled umbrellas that have begun to turn green with age. There is a man at the door who is prepared to receive royalty. You go upstairs and find four or five rooms where the paintings are on exhibition, and a salesroom with backless benches on which you sit if you come early. (Proceedings begin at one o’clock, which keeps you from getting any lunch.) The most fashionable people crowd in, those who love expensive art, the critics who write about it, and the dealers who buy and resell it; also the inquisitive public that likes to observe celebrities in action.
The tone of the place is very English, that is to say, dignified, solemn, even pompous. You stroll through the rooms and inspect what is offered. If you are “anybody,” you are known to “everybody,” and they watch you, and try to guess what you are there for. The cash value of a work of art is one of the most highly speculative things in the world—Zoltan Kertezsi said, almost as much so as the ca
sh value of a woman. It can be changed for better or for worse by a casual phrase, the lifting of an eyebrow, a depreciatory smile. There are some whose word is taken, and others whose money is taken, and of these two forces there can be an infinitude of subtle combinations and shadings.
Lanny had explained to his agent that he was bringing a multi-millionaire from Pittsburgh, a place that sounded like money. Both Harry and his wife looked like money—vulgar, American money that had to be manifested by new clothes. There also was the adorable Phyllis Gracyn, even more elaborately dressed, and it was soon known that the handsome young man who was showing her the Detaze—number 37 in the catalogue—was the scion of Budd’s, the American munitions works; he was the owner of the painting and stepson of the painter. Such items cause polite murmurs among visitors at art-sales.
When the important Zoltan Kertezsi came along with a German chemicals man who was in the financial pages of the newspapers, that, too, was something to whisper about; the Germans were said to be putting their money into paintings and diamonds, because they couldn’t trust the mark any more. The newspapers have reporters at these sales, to note who bids and what prices are paid, and that is one of the ways that reputations are made for artists both living and dead. The Sunday Times had singled out Sea and Rocks for praise, and the French dealers who were present had of course made note of that. Now they saw Zoltan Kertezsi leading his man in front of that picture and pointing out its merits. Everybody began suddenly talking Detaze. Oh, yes, that French painter who had had his face burned off in the war and had worn a mask for years. A work of art about which you can tell such a story to your friends is obviously much more interesting than one by a painter of whom you can say only that he was born on such a day and died on such another day.