— You've been quite successful in your efforts to keep me from meeting him, Basil Valentine interrupted. — One might think.
— Just watch your step with him, Recktall Brown muttered from the chair he filled, and Valentine, muttering something himself, turned his back and flung his cigarette into the fireplace, and stood looking at the carved letters beneath the mantel.
The chimney piece was a massive Elizabethan affair, ponderous like the rest of the furniture, the chairs standing out from the carpeting which stretched from wall to wall, and the two refectory tables, giving the place the look of an exclusive gentlemen's club; but only at first glance: for Recktall Brown, owner and host, was implicit everywhere. More than one guest had been provoked to make obvious remarks on the generic likeness between the head of the wart hog, mounted high on one wall, and the portrait of the host hung across the room. And even though he had been rallied often enough over that portrait (when he had been drink- ing), Recktall Brown would not remove it. Instead he could pause and look at it with fond veneration. They looked, too, over his shoulder, but none could find the youth he reverenced there. Instead they saw an unformed likeness of the face turned from them, ears protruding but erect, only the hands too similar. There were other paintings, especially the Patinir on the other side of the doorway, in whose neighborhood this portrait would at best have been an intrusive presence; but there was something in the thing itself which made it absurd, though it took a moment to realize what had happened. It had been painted from a photograph (the sitter too busy to sit more than that instant of the camera's eye) in which his hands, found in the foreground by the undiscriminating lens, were marvelously enlarged. The portrait painter, directed to copy that photograph faithfully and neither talented, nor paid enough, to do otherwise, had with attentive care copied the hands as they were in the picture. And pausing, passing it hundreds of times in the years since, often catching up one hand in the other before him, his hands came to resemble these in the portrait, filling out large and heavy, so apparently flaccid that they had been referred to once, and repeated by other voices in other rooms, as prehensile udders. And the diamond ring? It appeared; though none but himself knew that its double gleam had been added long after the paint of the portrait was dry.
Year after year, the painting and the wart hog hung, avoiding each other's eyes across the waves of pestilential heat that always filled that room.
— Damn her! Valentine brought out, turning suddenly. — That dog, lying there, licking her. self, can't you discourage these disgusting little attentions in public? He stood looking impatiently at the black shape on the roses, as though expecting some sharp defense from her owner, and when there was none, brought his eyes for a moment to the cloud of smoke rising shapeless from the chair, and the dark amorphous pools behind the thick lenses: Recktall Brown just looked at him, and he brought his narrow black-shod feet together and sat down. A moment later he was leaning forward again, studying the reproduction in Collectors Quarterly, his hands drawn up under his chin, and he appeared to kiss the gold seal ring he wore on a little finger.
— What time is it? Brown asked abruptly.
— After four, Basil Valentine murmured, then looked up to repeat sharply, — after four. He's probably drunk somewhere.
— He doesn't do that kind of thing, going out on a drunk and getting into trouble, I already told you, he's.
— Yes, you've told me, you've told me what a… aren't you fortunate! Most artists have a great lunk of a man they trail around with them, they never know what to do with him, he gets drunk, gets into trouble with the law, women, money. yes. Aren't you fortunate! having a protege with no animal self.
Recktall Brown started to speak, but subsided. His own hands embraced in his short wide lap, the diamonds glittering uppermost, he watched Valentine trace a contour in the picture with the tip of a little finger, then reach out to push away the ashtray whose smoldering cigar was sending an even current of smoke over the hand and up the arm: Valentine blew at the smoke pettishly, and asked, — How old is he?
— He's about thirty-three now. He looks more my age.
— He never goes to the showings, does he? When these paintings appear. I imagine I might have known him if he had.
— I don't know why not either. Brown laughed to himself, leaning forward with effort to take the cigar and throw it into the fireplace. — You'd think he'd get a kick out of them, seeing these important old maids blubbering over his pictures, these critics.
— Yes. Their eyes met for a moment, and Basil Valentine smiled. — It's heartbreaking to watch, isn't it. They are all so fearfully serious. But of course that's just what makes it all possible. The authorities are so deadly serious that it never occurs to them to doubt, they cannot wait to get ahead of one another to point out verifications. The experts.
— You said you came here for business. What is it? Brown said, not listening. He took off his glasses and lowered his sharp eyes to Basil Valentine who, as though knowing him to be near sightless this way, looked into Brown's eyes with a penetration which seemed to freeze the blue of his own.
— I'd prefer to wait until he gets here, he said calmly. — Strictly speaking, it's rather more than a matter of business, he went on as Brown rubbed his eyes and put his glasses on again. — It's really quite a challenge, a piece of work that will really challenge his genius.
Brown looked up through the thick lenses. — It damn near is genius.
— Talent often is, if frustrated for long enough. Today, at any rate, most of what we call genius around us is simply warped talent.
— Look, don't waste this kind of clever talk on me. Did you come here for business? or just because you want to meet.
— Of course, Valentine cut in, his voice stronger, — I am impatient to meet anyone capable of such work. Not an instant of the anxiety one always comes upon in… such work. To be able to move from the painstaking, meticulous strokes of Bouts to the boldness of van der Goes. Incredible! this… he motioned at the open reproduction, — slight uncertainty of a tremendous passion, aiming at just a fraction more than he could ever accomplish, poor fellow.
— Who?
— Van der Goes. He died mad, you know. Settled down in a convent, working and drinking. He believed himself eternally damned, finally ran about telling everyone about it. Such exquisite flowers he painted. And such magnificent hands, Basil Valentine added, looking at his own.
Recktall Brown had taken out a cigar, and he opened his gold-plated penknife. — I don't want any slips, he said, trimming the cigar. — He's already done three by this same one, this van Gogh.
— Van Gogh!.
— You just said.
— Good heavens, Brown! Valentine stood up, with the gold cigarette case. — My dear fellow, he could no more paint van Gogh than he could fly. Valentine laughed, walking out into the room, watching his narrow black shoes on the carpet. — But the minute another van der Goes appears they rush off to compare it with the last one he did. They're never disappointed. You know, he added, turning away abruptly as he approached the black shape of the dog, — his work is so good it has almost been taken for forgery.
— What do you mean by that?
— By the lesser authorities, of course. The ones who look at paintings with twentieth-century eyes. Styles change, he mused, and stood looking up the wall behind the bar at the extensive wool tapestry hung there, originally intended to warm and decorate the bleak stone interior of some northern castle, here concealing well-heated paneling. The figures in this tapestry were engaged in some sort of hunt, or sylvan picnic, it was difficult to tell in this light. Their eyes were apparent, however, all turned in one direction, all staring at the portrait of Recktall Brown, as though arrested by its presence, and the gaze which it did not return: a flock of hard eyes, disdaining those fixed upon them now. And as though aware of their scorn, Valentine turned his back on them. — Taste changes, he went on in an irritating monotone. — Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they're so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste arid style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse that any genuine article must endure. He had walked up behind the chair where Recktall Brown sat with thick calves extended baronially toward the fireplace, and stood looking down at the back of Brown's head and the heavy folds of flesh over the back of the collar. Nothing moved there, but for slight twitches of the cigar as it shifted among uneven teeth. Valentine ground the knuckles of one open hand in the palm of the other, and turned away. The quickness of his movements might have indicated an extreme nervousness, but for his restraint, moving away now with the disciplined motions of a diver, every turn to some purpose, though he simply walked down the room again, and came back saying, — And incidentally, you needn't give another thought to that contretemps with the Dalner Gallery.