He pulled himself out of his chair, with some effort. He still has a lame leg, thought Darcourt. It goes well with his generally Byronic personality. He has developed a sliding walk, to disguise his lameness, just like Byron. I wonder if it’s conscious imitation—Byronic hero-worship—or if he can’t help it?
With Powell out of the way, there was nothing for it but to plunge into his news about The Marriage at Cana. He told the tale as convincingly as he could; he wanted to open a new world to his friends, not frighten them with an explosion. For the first time, he spoke to them of his visit to Princess Amalie, to confirm that her Old Master drawing was, in fact, a portrait of herself, done in girlhood by a man on whom she had had a youthful crush. He did not think it necessary to speak of his thefts in the University Library and even in the National Gallery; these were, he now assured himself, not thefts in the ordinary sense, but adventures on the journey of the Fool, guided by intuition and governed by a morality that was not to everybody’s taste. If everything worked out as he hoped, what he had done justified itself, and if he were not lucky, he might find himself in jail. With gentleness, but determination, he told of his astonishment when, in the Princess’s drawing-room, displayed among a number of convincing Old Masters, and in itself convincing to any eye but his own, he saw The Marriage, and with shocked astonishment recognized the faces as belonging to Grandfather McRory’s Sun Pictures, and to Francis Cornish’s numerous, neglected sketchbooks. There could be no doubt about it, he insisted: Francis was The Alchemical Master, and the great picture was not yet fifty years old.
Arthur and Maria heard all this more or less in silence, though now and then Arthur whistled. It was necessary to come to the real point.
“You understand what this will mean to my biography of Francis,” he said. “It is the justification of the book. The climax. It establishes Francis as a very great painter. Working in the mode of a bygone day, but a great painter nonetheless.”
“But in the mode of a bygone day,” said Arthur. “He may be a great painter, but that makes him unmistakably a faker.”
“Not at all,” said Darcourt. “There is not a shred of evidence that Francis meant to deceive anybody. The picture was never offered for sale, and if it hadn’t been for the war, he would undoubtedly have taken it with him when he left Düsterstein, and nobody will convince me that he would have tried to palm it off as a sixteenth-century work. The Princess knows about it. The picture was stashed away in a store-room of the castle, and when the castle was taken over during the occupation of Germany it disappeared with a lot of other stuff. It was restored to the Düsterstein family after the war, by the Commission that dealt with such matters, of which Francis was a member. That’s a bit fishy, but we don’t know the details. And the family—that’s to say Princess Amalie—has it still.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” said Arthur. “Why did he paint it in this sixteenth-century manner? And look at this article in Apollo, that explains it all. If it wasn’t meant to deceive, why paint it like that?”
“That’s where we come to the point that is going to be the making of my book,” said Darcourt. “You don’t remember Francis in any detail. But I do. He was the most inward-looking man I have ever known. He turned things over and over in his mind, and he reached conclusions. That picture is the most important of his conclusions. It represents what he thought most important in his life, the influences, the crosscurrents, the tapestry, as Al Crane would say if he had a chance. In that picture Francis was making up his soul, as surely as if he had been some reflective hermit, or cloistered monk. What you see in the picture is the whole matter of Francis, as he saw it himself.”
“Yes, but why in this mock sixteenth-century style?”
“Because it is the last style in which a painter could do what Francis was doing. After the Renaissance do you see any pictures that reveal all that a man knows about himself? The great self-portraits, of course. But even when Rembrandt painted himself in old age, he could only show what life had done to him, not how life had done it. With the Renaissance, painting took a new turn, and threw away all that allegorical-metaphysical stuff, all that symbolic communication. You probably don’t know that Francis was an expert on iconography—the way you discover what a painter meant, instead of just what anybody can see. In The Marriage he means to tell his own truth, as clearly as he can. And he wasn’t telling it to someone else. The picture was a confession, a summing-up, intended simply for himself. It’s a magnificent thing in several different ways.”
“Who’s the peculiar angel?” said Maria. “You left him out when you told us who all the characters were. He’s obviously somebody of the greatest importance.”
“I am virtually certain he was Francis’s elder brother. Only one of the sketches is labelled, but it is identified as Francis the First, and I can only guess that he was a very deep influence on Francis the Second’s whole life.”
“How? It looks like an idiot,” said Arthur.
“Presumably it was an idiot. You didn’t know your uncle. He was a deeply compassionate man. Oh, he had the reputation for being a curmudgeon, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and often he seemed to have no tolerance for people at all. But I knew him, and he was far beyond what people mean when they say tender-hearted—which can mean cabbage-headed. He had a sense of the profoundly tragic fragility of human life that I have never known in anyone else, and I am as sure as I can be of anything that it was the knowledge of this grotesque creature, this parody of what he was himself, that made him so. He was a romantic in his youth; look at the way he has painted the girl who became his wife, and let him down so painfully. Look at the dwarf; Francis knew that poor wretch, alive and dead, and he did what he could to balance the scales of Fate when he painted him. All the portraits in The Marriage are judgements on people Francis knew, and they are the judgements of a man who had been rudely booted out of a youthful romanticism into a finely compassionate realism. Now Arthur, for God’s sake don’t ask me again why he painted this summing-up of his life in this bygone style. It was the only style that would contain what he had to say. The Old Masters were deeply religious men, and this is a deeply religious picture.”
“I never heard anyone suggest that Uncle Frank was religious.”
“The word is greatly misunderstood in the turmoil of our day,” said Darcourt, “but in so far as it means seeking to know, and to live, beneath the surfaces of life, and to be aware of the realities beneath the superficialities, you may take it from me that Francis was truly religious.”
“Uncle Frank a great painter!” said Arthur. “I don’t know just how to cope with it.”
“But it’s bloody marvellous!” said Maria. “A genius in the family! Aren’t you thrilled, Arthur?”
“There have been some rather bright people in the family, but if they were geniuses, or near it, they were financial geniuses. And don’t let anybody tell you that financial genius is just low cunning. It’s the real intuitive goods. But this sort of genius—For a financial family a painter is rather a skeleton in the cupboard.”
“There is something about a cupboard that makes a skeleton very restless,” said Darcourt. “Francis Cornish is loudly demanding to be let out.”
“Your problem is going to be these people in New York. How will they like it when you reveal that their treasured Old Master—the only known work of The Alchemical Master—is a phoney?”